It’s not that Jonathan Carlyle, 40, didn’t believe that the coronavirus vaccine was important or safe. But with three children, including a 5-month-old baby, and a full-time job, getting the shot just wasn’t a priority — until, that is, he realized he could potentially win $1 million through Ohio’s vaccine lottery.
“I was putting it off a lot because I was working all the time, and I just kept putting it off and off and off, but I knew I needed to get it, and I wanted to get it,” Carlyle told the Cincinnati Enquirer. “When y’all announced the Vax-a-Million, as soon as I heard that, I was, like, ‘Yes, I need to go do this now.'”
Carlyle got lucky. He was one of several Ohioans who won the state’s Vax-a-Million drawing, bringing home a $1 million prize for his family.
“I pretty much almost lost it inside the van,” he recalled.
Were there others like Carlyle, who, upon seeing the financial incentives several states rolled out to motivate residents to get vaccinated, decided that was reason enough to schedule a vaccination appointment? Not really, according to a recent study.
Researchers at the Boston University School of Medicine found that Ohio’s lottery did not increase coronavirus vaccination rates when compared with other states that did not offer a lottery incentive. The chances of actually winning the lottery were so low that very few on-the-fence residents were convinced that getting the shot was worthwhile, the researchers explained.
The Boston researchers took data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and examined adult vaccination rates in Ohio four weeks before and four weeks after the lottery was announced and compared those rates to the rest of the country. What they found is that Ohio’s rates followed the same trends as every other state and that any increase in vaccination numbers had more to do with the Food and Drug Administration expanding its authorization of the vaccine to younger adolescents than anything else.
If the states wanted to be effective at increasing vaccination rates, they would invest the resources allocated to lottery prizes into long-term outreach programs that “target underlying reasons for vaccine hesitancy and low vaccine uptake,” the researchers said.
Carlyle, however, might disagree — as would the Ohio officials who made his big win possible.
“The publicity the lottery has generated has spread the word more cost effectively than a P.S.A. campaign would at this point,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine argued in an op-ed for the New York Times. Critics might call the lottery a waste, he added, but “the real waste — when the vaccine is readily available to anyone who wants it — is not doing enough to save people’s lives.”
Whether the state’s lottery actually did help save lives is up for debate. But it did make a hard-working Toledo farmer a rich man, and he’s not going to complain about that.
