The government should be offering more incentives to get vaccinated

A different approach could mean refuseniks get their jabs, allowing us to move faster towards getting back to normal, writes Janet Street-Porter

Cash for jabs? (Shutterstock/Viacheslav Lopatin)

Is offering cash the best way to entice vaccine refuseniks to comply when all else has failed?

President Joe Biden thinks so. This week he called on all US states to offer people $100 (£72) each to get jabbed. With the Delta variant surging in the US, the number of people who still haven’t been vaccinated (just under half of the population) is causing huge concern. More than 40 per cent of workers in care homes have still not received the jab and anxious employers – including Google, Netflix, Twitter and Apple – are pushing back the date they’ve asked workers to return to the office to October.

The reasons for vaccine refusal are complex – for some Republicans, it’s political, they claim that mandating vaccination infringes personal freedom. Others have been swept up by fake claims of potential harm on social media. Whatever, the fact remains that 97 per cent of Covid-19 patients in US hospitals have not been vaccinated.