The government should be offering more incentives to get vaccinated

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.

Facing a potential economic and social disaster, Biden has issued an order that all federal workers must be jabbed or submit to testing up to three times a week, be forced to wear a mask and will not be able to travel for work. He plans to make vaccination compulsory for military personnel. The Justice Department has confirmed these presidential mandates are legal. Employers are rapidly following suit – New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, announced this week that state employees must be vaccinated or submit to testing. Tech companies like Google agree and plan to roll that decision out in the 40 countries where they operate.

Should the UK government follow Biden’s lead and offer cash or incentives to those who still have not been jabbed?

In the US, the cost of cash incentives will be covered by a $1.9bn stimulus package approved several months ago. The UK government poured money into furlough and business support schemes, which are coming to an end. Should we allocate even more cash to try and seduce a minority of the population who are not following government guidance? We’ve already spent millions of pounds public money on advertising, but take-up has stalled among most age groups. One third of young people have still not had a single jab - but take-up rates are still rising among those aged 18-24.

Our tactics seem pretty brutal, even bullying. Boris Johnson has decided to target the young in particular with a series of threats – no admittance to university lectures and being barred from nightclubs and pubs and sporting events without a Covid passport or proof of vaccination.

Michael Gove accused those who did not get jabbed of being "selfish" earlier this week – with Johnson saying it would be "helpful" for young people to get vaccinated. It might be irritating, but is refusing a jab necessarily an act of pure self-interest? For many in the minority ethnic communities, it could be an act of caution, a result of government missteps in the past.

And no matter how many famous actors and sportspeople the government might push to promote the benefits of vaccination, a small number of people remain stubborn and single minded. Please let’s not condemn people for not jumping up and falling into line just because it suits Gove and Johnson. We live in a democracy, not North Korea. Calling people selfish is shaming and not going to produce a result.

Let’s try a different approach – nudging.

When the government wanted to tackle obesity, it didn’t think twice about telling the NHS it was OK to offer vouchers for fruit and veg at supermarkets, and passes for gyms. So what’s the difference with Covid vaccination refuseniks? There are government plans for an app which would allow the government to check your supermarket purchases, and if participants were a good people buying plenty of healthy fruit and veg, they would be eligible for rewards.

That proposal seems highly intrusive, another example of blurring the lines between the public and the private – nannying and governmental snooping using smartphones in the name of health and "saving" the NHS. There’s been a big growth in the amount of our personal data the government has access to since this pandemic, through track and trace and the Covid app. Officials claim it will all be deleted, but should we trust them?

For example, it has emerged that dozens of companies have had access to years of health records from English hospitals.

For the young, privacy is not as big an issue as for my generation. They willingly swap and share information via social media without a second thought. Perhaps the offer of cash or meal vouchers or discount codes might persuade some of them to get a jab. No harm can come of making the offer, because taking vaccination teams into churches, high streets and clubs has been done. Few people can complain a jab was hard to access.

Does it matter if a small minority of the population remain unvaccinated? According to Professor Neil Ferguson – the chap who predicted 100,000 infections a day a couple of weeks ago – the pandemic is waning, and will be something "we have to live with" by the autumn.

For the last couple of months, the government has used complex data and scientific predictions – like those issued by Professor Ferguson – to scare us into submission. As a result, we’re still wearing masks. New figures show that a quarter of hospital inpatients with Covid were actually admitted for another reason.

But the attack on refuseniks and young people continues with England’s deputy chief medical advisor Professor Jonathan Van-Tam claiming that hospitals are admitting people in their twenties “who will not survive”.

For goodness sake, it’s time for Gove and co to calm down and dish out a few £50 vouchers. Should they prove ineffective, I believe we can live with the minimal threat to our health if it means freedom of choice has been protected.