What is it about?
We studied the impact of sending personal reminder messages urging patients in a county health system not to delay getting a bivalent COVID-19 booster shot — both with and without a $25 incentive for vaccination. Individuals were randomly assigned to receive a reminder message, a reminder message with a financial incentive for getting boosted, or no reminder or financial incentive. Because most of the patients recruited from the health system are insured through Medicaid, a public health insurance for people with low incomes, the experiment focused on vaccination among those who are more vulnerable and at risk for poorer health outcomes than the general population. Reminder messages increased booster vaccination take-up within 2-weeks of the message by 32.5 percent off a baseline of 2.65 percent boosted. Small financial incentives had no additional impact on vaccination rates compared to reminders without financial incentives. Reminder messages were especially effective among high-risk groups such as Spanish speakers and those ages 65 and over.
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Why is it important?
COVID-19 booster vaccination rates around the world are low, even though they are the best source of protection against serious illness or death. Experimental evidence on how to increase booster vaccination rates is limited. Our results suggest that the financial incentives offered for booster vaccinations by some jurisdictions would have been better spent on outreach.
Perspectives
A key takeaway of our study is that many people in the United States will, in fact, get a COVID booster if we just remind them to do so. On the other hand, our work adds to the evidence that we in the U.S. treat the COVID vaccine differently from many other vaccines, For example, small financial incentives have been shown effective in increasing flu vaccination rates, but they just don’t seem to work for COVID shots.
Mireille Jacobson
University of Southern California
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Reminders, but not monetary incentives, increase COVID-19 booster uptake, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2302725120.
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