Vaccine Lure: Taco (Or $10) With Your Shot

Seeking to convince holdouts to get vaccinated for Covid-19, New Haven is turning to cash — and fried tortillas.

The goal is to convince the vaccine-wary uninoculated like Destinee Leiti.

It’s a hard sell. Leiti, for instance, said a ten spot or taco truck voucher won’t convince her to get vaccinated right away.

What would? Some more time, she said, and more evidence showing that Covid-19 vaccines are safe in the long run.

Leiti offered that take Thursday afternoon while sitting with her aunt and her aunt’s friend at a picnic table on Long Wharf Drive, just across the street from the city’s taco cart-rich Food Truck Paradise.

That’s where, starting last weekend and running every Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. through the end of May and all of June, the city is partnering with Griffin Health to offer free, walk-up vaccination clinics.

Those pop-ups are offering more than just injectable protections from Covid-19.

They’re also sweetening the deal with incentives seeking to make getting a shot a fun, festive, and desirable activity for those who have remained reluctant.

Last weekend, Griffin Health dished out $10 cash payments to 57 lunch-goers who stopped by their tent to get a first shot of the Pfizer vaccine.

Going forward, the Long Wharf-based weekend clinic will distribute $10 vouchers for the newly vaccinated that they can use to pick up a taco or two (or three) at the popular nearby trucks.

The cash payment / taco voucher strategy comes at a time when New Haven, the rest of the state, and the country as a whole run up against just the latest public health challenge of the ongoing pandemic.

Vaccine supply is now plentiful. Willing arms to take those shots, not so much.

According to the state Department of Public Health, 38 percent of New Haveners are fully vaccinated, and 45 percent have received at least one dose.

The city-Griffin Health popup clinic’s incentive experimentation on Long Wharf represents one way that public health agencies are trying to nudge a reluctant segment of the public towards protecting themselves, their families, and their communities.

Leiti’s response — as well as the responses of a handful of taco truck visitors the Independent spoke with this week — shows that $10 in cash or tacos might not necessarily do the trick, especially for people who have seriously considered getting vaccinated and have so far decided not to for personal, social, or historical reasons.

“I prefer to wait it out,” Leiti said.

She said she’s managed to stay healthy and Covid-free for the first 15 months of the pandemic. She’s worried she’ll have a bad reaction to a vaccine shot, and that doses may have unintended long-term consequences.

“It’s not something I’m not going to do,” she said about getting vaccinated. ​“I just want to see how things play out.”

Trying To Create A ​“Festive Atmosphere”

Griffin Health spokesperson Robert O’Mara told the Independent that the hospital has been experimenting for weeks with different ways to encourage unvaccinated people to come out to a clinic, change their minds, and get a shot.

“We’ve been doing vaccination clinics all over the place in New Haven, Waterbury, the Naugatuck Valley,” he said. ​“And there’s a lot of reluctance out there. We’re doing everything we can to encourage vaccinations.”

Usually, he said, that means ​“trying to create a more festive atmosphere” by playing music and giving out free ice cream or pizza (which is exactly what Griffin Health and the city have done during recent popup clinics on the Green.)

Last weekend, Griffin Health’s vaccination incentive by the Long Wharf taco trucks took the form of $10 cash payments funded by the hospital.

O’Mara said the hospital did not necessarily plan on handing out cash to people to lure them towards a vaccine on Long Wharf. But, given the short notice and quick planning that led to the setting up of last weekend’s clinic, the hospital decided that the best and easiest perk to provide in that moment came in the form of a $10 bill.

For the rest of May and June, the Long Wharf clinic will be giving out $10 vouchers that can be used at nearby taco trucks, rather than $10 in cash, he said.

The goal of these incentives — whether cash or taco vouchers or pizza or ice cream — is to help ​“overcome hesitancy” by creating a ​“fun atmosphere,” O’Mara said.

“How can we best help save people’s lives?” he asked. By getting as many people vaccinated as possible.

What’s one way to boost those numbers? By trying to make getting vaccinated a good time.

“Is there a way to use these vouchers to get people vaccinated, overcome hesitancy, and help them enjoy their day? If we can be a part of it and encourage” people to gets shots that are exceptionally safe and effective at protecting the world from Covid-19, it’s worth trying, O’Mara said.

In separate interviews about the Long Wharf clinic vaccination incentives, Mayor Justin Elicker and city Community Services Administrator (CSA) Mehul Dalal both endorsed experimenting with different incentives — including cash payments — to encourage vaccinations.

“We have to get everyone vaccinated. Period,” Elicker said. ​“And we have to find creative ways to incentivize people to get a shot.”

Dalal said that there’s quite a bit of evidence showing that public health incentives do work.

“People who might be on the fence” might find $10 in cash or a taco voucher to be the slight push they need to do something that protects them and their community.

Dalal pointed to the recent $5 million ​“Vax-a-Million” lottery in Ohio, where the governor promised $1 million prizes to five randomly chosen resident who got vaccinated against Covid-19.

While the odds of someone winning that big cash prize are slim, Dalal said, the lotto garnered loads of attention — and encouraged tens of thousands of people to get their shots.

In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo also recently announced a ​“Vax & Scratch” lotto that gives vaccinated individuals a chance to win as little as $20 and as much as $5 million.

“I think having those incentives is a tool in the toolbox,” he said.

“Definitely Helps” Vs. ​“Bribing Won’t Work”

During interviews by the taco trucks this week, lunch-goers were mixed on the potential efficacy of $10 perks to win over the still-unvaccinated.

“It would be nice. That’s gas in the tank,” said Hill resident Mer Rosario. ​“For some people, they just have to be given an incentive to do something.”

Rosario said she’s already vaccinated, and has been for months. ​“It’s a civic duty,” she said when asked why she got her shot.

Her husband, meanwhile, has continued to hold out. He’s African American, she said, and regularly brings up the Tuskegee syphilis experiment when explaining his hesitation around participating in what he sees as an experimental medical treatment.

Would $10 convince him otherwise? ​“Maybe $1,000,” she said with a smile.

Rosario’s friend Patty Giordano was less reserved in her endorsement of the $10 incentive strategy.

“I think it’s a great idea,” she said. Like Rosario, she too is already fully vaccinated. She said she has become quite the vaccine evangelist as of late after watching her home country of Brazil become one of the worst-hit places in the world by Covid.

East Haven resident Jesse Proto also praised giving cash out to encourage people to get vaccinated.

“It definitely helps,” he said. ​“Free money’s not easy to come by.”

Proto said he’s already fully vaccinated. Does he have many friends and family who still haven’t gotten their shots? ​“It’s about 50 – 50,” Proto said. ​“But the longer time passes, I think the more likely people will get vaccinated.”

A man who gave his name as Douglas said he too has gotten both of his shots — and knows plenty of people, friends and family alike, who have not. He got vaccinated because his jobs as a radio-frequency engineer takes him all over the country.

Since he knew he’d be traveling even during the pandemic, he wanted to do his best to protect himself.

“People are suspicious of it,” Douglas said about the vaccines. ​“Bribing people won’t work.”

He said that, if politicians and public health workers want to convince the skeptical to get vaccinated, they need to focus on debunking myths and addressing deeply rooted concerns — about whether the vaccines were developed too quickly, about whether they’re safe in the long term, about whether they’re part of a government conspiracy to control people.

One taco truck visitor who asked to remain anonymous gave one of those latter reasons when asked why he has refused to get vaccinated so far, and likely will continue to hold out for as long as he can.

“Who benefits? The pharmaceutical companies,” he said about the mass vaccination push. ​“To me, the government is desperate.”

Having worked through the whole pandemic as a tow truck driver, he said he’s seen friends and family and co-workers contract the virus.

His mother even died recently after coming down with Covid, he said. He just doesn’t believe Covid is what killed her. ​“She had cancer,” he said. And, while public health experts have long established that Covid is particularly dangerous in older people with co-morbidities, he thinks cancer is more to blame.