Proposal: Refuse Vaccine, Pay for Your Own COVID-19 Treatment

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am a big proponent of getting vaccinated against the virus. I did so myself at the soonest possible opportunity.

But there remains a too-large portion of the population that is choosing not to be vaccinated. Unless many of them can be persuaded, this group will prevent us from achieving population immunity. 

I have a proposal for persuading them that I've mentioned in passing before. This post is to flesh it out.

First, are people resisting the vaccine for good reasons?  According to some researchers I know who recently completed a nationwide survey, the most common objections of never-vaxxers are as follows:

• They worry that vaccines are not safe. This is an unreasonable belief. In the U.S., 305,687,618 doses of the vaccines have been administered. If there were something really dangerous about the shots, we'd know it by now. Nobody—except maybe a few people who developed blood clots after taking the J&J vaccine—has died from being vaccinated. Meanwhile 596,059 people have died from not being vaccinated.
• They fear side effects. This is was at one point a reasonable fear of people who, when vaccines were hard to get, worried that if they get vaccinated one day then have to miss work the next, they might lose income or get fired. But now appointments are abundant and can be scheduled at a local pharmacy at convenient time, like before a day or weekend off.
• They think the vaccines aren't effective. Effectiveness has been conclusively demonstrated. It's not even arguable at this point.
• They think the vaccines were produced too fast. Egged-on by the past administration's idiotic decision to call it "Project Warp Speed," some conspiracies hold that the production/approval process was rushed and/or rigged and resulted in faulty review and an unsafe product. First, see the point about safety above. Second vaccines got approved and produced quickly because the government threw resources at the problem, pharma companies ran things in parallel (for instance, building factories while trials were underway rather than waiting until trials concluded), and regulatory agencies prioritized and streamlined bureaucratic processes to accelerate approval, among other things. No compromises to clinical trial procedures were made.
• They worry vaccines could make them infertile. On one hand this is hard to dispel because there hasn't been enough time to study it. On the other hand there is no current evidence of this and there is no reason to expect it. Meanwhile the virus has made 596,059 unvaccinated people infertile by making them dead.

There are more objections than this, but they drift farther and farther into crackpottery. We can conclude that as of now there are no good reasons to avoid vaccinations.

So why do people cling to these arguments? I think it's because there is (in most cases) zero cost/risk of doing so. People can indulge their adolescent-level reactance, refuse to be vaccinated because somebody wants them to be, and suffer no consequences other than the possibility of being infected. As more and more people get vaccinated even that risk declines. 

Furthermore, if someone who is unvaccinated does become infected and seriously ill, then the medical system will step in and most likely save them. Who pays for that? Everybody, including the people who have been vaccinated. 

In other words, anti-vaxxers can freeload off those of us who have been responsible. If they get unlucky and catch COVID-19, they can count on a medical system, in large part paid for by the responsible, to save their bacon.

In this country we can't force people to be vaccinated against their will; however, we can stop underwriting their risk. Let's have a new law: If vaccinations have been available to you for some period of time (say, a month or two) and you have chosen not to take them, then if you get COVID-19 you are on the hook for all the costs of your treatment. No insurance coverage. It's all out of your pocket.

There would have to be exceptions for bona fide, documented, medical reasons. There would also need to be exceptions for people who truly can't access the vaccines because of inability to travel to a vaccination site. There are people like that. But let the rest of them put their money where their mouths are. 

Image "Anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist at a Tea Party Express rally" by Fibonacci Blue is licensed under CC BY 2.0