The Daily Sceptic
BY WILL JONES
5 JANUARY 2024 12:10 PM
It’s time to start paying people to take vaccines to boost take-up. That’s according to Dr. Raymond Duch, an Oxford academic writing in the Financial Times. This is the lesson he’s taken from the Covid pandemic, apparently.
Dr. Duch, a Director of the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences at Nuffield College, Oxford, writing in collaboration with Professor Philip Clarke, an economist of the Nuffield Department of Population Health, says that their trial of this measure in Ghana (yes, they actually got ethical approval to try it out – now published in Nature) proves that it works. By works they mean that yes, some poorer people will offer you their arm if you offer them hard cash – in this case an amount equivalent to around 15% of the weekly food bill, which is $3 is Ghana and may be around $14 in the U.S. But by ‘works’ they don’t mean that it successfully reduces Covid deaths or illness. They didn’t look at that. And since Ghana had almost zero confirmed Covid deaths, we can assume the (positive) impact of vaccination in the country was non-existent (even allowing that official Covid deaths may be under-counted).