Offering incentives to young people to get vaccinated is not coercion – it is good sense

Editorial: Now that there are sufficient vaccines to go round, it makes perfect sense to try to achieve herd immunity in the coming weeks

(Brian Adcock)

The younger age group have shown willingness in principle to have the Covid vaccines, according to surveys, and their sense of public duty seems admirable. They have not, on the whole, been convinced that the authorities are using magnets, the 5G network or microchips to exercise mind control during the fictional “great reset”, and they have shown discrimination in rejecting the counsel of the likes of David Icke to avoid vaccination.

However, vaccination rates for the under-30s are lower than ideal, given that the government pre-empted the completion of the vaccine programme by setting an unrealistic deadline for so-called freedom day. Hence the rush to get needles into arms.

Incentives are a sound idea. The modest vouchers and discounts offered by Deliveroo and Uber, among others, seem well-judged. They are not so generous as to provoke resentment among those already jabbed (assuming eligibility is restricted in that way) nor would they create a false incentive for any future programme for people to wait until the vouchers are offered before booking an appointment. Protection, even partial, against a potentially deadly disease should be incentive enough to book early.

On the other hand, the promise of a cheap burger or free cab ride is sufficiently enticing to stimulate immediate reactions and speed up the vaccination rate. It is difficult to quantify the benefit to the NHS and the economy from a lower case rate and fewer absentees in the workplace, but it far exceeds whatever the cost to the public purse of companies signing up for the schemes.

Now that there are sufficient vaccines to go around, it makes perfect sense to try to achieve herd immunity in the coming weeks. At the beginning of next month, the schools will reassemble and there is every chance that there will be some consequent increase in transmission of the coronavirus as our changeable weather grows cooler through the autumn. That too will push the R rate higher.

In due course the annual round of flu infections will add to the pressures on the NHS, on top of attending to the backlog of non-Covid work. These few weeks represent the last opportunity to fill the gaps in what health secretary Sajid Javid calls a “defensive wall” so that no one need “cower” from the disease, as he once put it.

Other countries have introduced similar schemes. In Sweden a jabee recovers the equivalent of £17. In the Netherlands you get a herring (not live). In the US state of Washington they’ll give you a single rolled cannabis joint, which is perhaps not quite the optimal public health message. Each to their own, however, and the big picture is of a world gradually getting its defences right, and mobilising all the ingenuity of its scientists, businesses and economists to do so.