A modest proposal: What about COVID bribes?

In combatting the pandemic efficiently and successfully, Switzerland is in a pretty bad place right now. It’s not nearly as bad as Austria or Germany (or a bunch of Eastern Europe, for that matter), but it’s not too far behind.

There aren’t too many reasons to believe that things will go any better in Switzerland than it’s gone in those countries—with their overflowing hospitals and people dying due to emergency-triage policies.

That’s the thing about playing musical chairs for real: when you don’t get a chair, you don’t just go back to the circle with the other losers and start clapping to the music. No, in real life, when you don’t get a metaphorical chair, you die.

A lot of us think that that isn’t something that should be allowed to happen in a country that’s well-known as one of the most civilized and technologically, medically, and philosophically advanced in the world.

Switzerland isn’t alone in wasting the opportunity it has—opportunity that a lot of other countries can’t even dream of having, to say nothing of wasting. So this story and proposal should be applicable elsewhere.

Solidaritätsmangel (a failure of solidarity)

We have a problem with people who don’t believe that this is the story of what’s happening. There are a lot of people who are either unwilling—or incapable—of seeing the connection between their actions and the scenario described above. They see only their own personal sphere, make decisions based only on their own personal well-being—and perhaps the well-being of a few close relatives and acquaintances.

They don’t acknowledge that, simply because they feel that they are unlikely to be strongly affected by COVID—whether because they feel they’re strong enough, or young enough, or taking the right witch’s brew of self-prescribed chemicals—that they still pose a not inconsequential danger to society. If they get sick, they think only of their own personal survival and recovery, not of the people to whom they might spread the disease—people who might be weaker, or older, or perhaps who don’t know about the miraculous cures you can find online.

Nor do people “believe in” the predictable scaling effects. A single person getting ill isn’t going to be a problem, not when only 1% go to the hospital—even fewer if they’re young. This illness tends to keep people in the hospital for a while—tying up a lot of resources and personnel in the process. If enough people get sick at once—and they are doing so because even .1% of millions is a lot of people—the hospitals fill up.

Now, it’s not just the people in the hospital who are in trouble, but a country full of people who no longer have a working healthcare system at their disposal. At that point, people without COVID will die because of COVID.

That explanation is already too complex, though. People like a simple, predictable process, like: go out into the sun without sunscreen? You get sunburned. Not “you might be sunburned” or “other people might get skin cancer”. A direct, observable, and painful effect that cannot be misunderstood.[1]

There is a not insignificant portion of the Swiss population that is not availing themselves of a safe, effective, and free medication that would dramatically decrease both the human and economic cost of the pandemic if enough people were to take it. These people probably watch a lot more team sports than I do, but they don’t know what it means to play on a team—to take one for the team, as the saying goes.

A failure of vision

Society is fundamentally broken, but it’s all we have right now. The world is now fully marketized. Margaret Thatcher has won. As she once decreed, a large minority of the population now believes that “there is no such thing as society”. There are only transactions between unaffiliated individuals, with no pre-existing trust relationship. People don’t matter. Society has given you nothing and you owe it nothing in return, is their philosophy.

Now, don’t get me wrong: in moments of darkness, I, too, wonder whether we really need to save everyone. There are, after all, more than enough people to go around. The Gubrist tunnel is still full no matter when you drive through the damned thing. Maybe fewer people would be better. Maybe these people are onto something! But who gets to choose who lives and who dies? That’s always the problem. I don’t want to make that choice, so I approve of trying to save as many people as seems feasible.[2]

I don’t think that that’s their calculus, though. I think that they don’t like being told what to do unless they’re also told that it will directly benefit them. Doing something for the good of society is passé and unlikely to find a sympathetic ear in a world where everyone is hustling for themselves in an increasingly gigged/rigged economy. The only way to get ahead is to step on others. If you’re not stepping on anyone, then you’re the one being stepped on.

The task at hand

Society has something that it wants: it wants to exert its significant scientific, economic, and medical muscle to beat back the pandemic, to stop expending so much energy on constantly fighting the same battle over and over again. It wants to win the war on this crisis so that it can move on to the far more significant crisis waiting for it: climate change.[3]

That’s what a sane and just society wants. It wants to expend its resources efficiently. It wants to survive. That’s the long-term goal.

We’re not talking about preserving every feature of existing society, warts and all, but about getting to a point where we’re no longer spending so much time, resources, energy, and attention on combatting a stupid virus.

How do we get there? Well, society started out by asking people to do the right thing. That actually worked surprisingly well, at first! The solidarity expressed in the first couple of months of the pandemic was heartwarming and hopeful.

A lot of people did a reasonable job of conforming to the bare minimum of living in a society. They stayed home, they stayed in home office, they wore masks, they got vaccinated. It wasn’t that it didn’t involve any effort or suffering—there was still a lot of that—but wearing a mask and getting a shot helps a tremendous amount relative to the personal investment.

As with anything else, though, we got bored with it. It was fun for a while to pretend that we were more interested in a higher purpose than in our prosaic concerns. But the way our world is built wouldn’t allow that to continue for very long. The thrust of society pushes toward consumption, toward growth, toward bigger, better, faster, more. It uses greed and envy to generate needless economic activity. Over the long term, staying home, reducing consumption, etc. to protect others was a no-go.

Settled science

It’s not a question of who’s right. At this point, there is very clear and overwhelming data showing us what the most efficient and efficacious approach to winning the war against COVID is.

The arguments about the efficacy or safety of the vaccine were legitimate at the very beginning, but they are very much dead in the water today. It’s been a year. Half the planet is vaccinated. People are not getting ill or dying in significant numbers from the vaccine. They are doing so as a result of catching COVID. The scientific community is in agreement.

We should not care what a vocal, untrained, and self-nominated minority has to say about the facts of the matter. We must, unfortunately, concern ourselves with them because of the undue influence they have on people.

What must be done is not without effort, but it’s also not particularly difficult. It involves work—and working together—but it’s not complicated. We have to be careful to do it without accidentally—or deliberately—extending the surveillance or authoritarian state, but I believe we in Switzerland are capable of enacting measures that will be reduced when they are no longer necessary.

Any ideas?

So: society has a big problem called the COVID pandemic that’s costing a lot of time, energy, resources, and money. It’s a sinkhole. There is a solution, but pretty much everyone has to play along in order for it to work. It’s in our best interests to get better at dealing with pandemics because there are, in all likelihood, more of these coming.

A lot of people played along without much effort on society’s part—whether because they respond well to authority or because they trust society or because they thought about the argument outlined above—and they came to the obvious conclusion.

There are still millions of Swiss to be vaccinated. What do we do, as a society? What are our options?

We could kill them all. If they’re dead, they can’t spread the virus. Or we could lock them up, prevent them from partaking in society. If they’re not around others, they can’t spread the virus.

Neither of these is really practicable.

Austria is sending people vaccination appointments and fining them heavily if they fail to comply. I think Germany is doing something similar now. That’s the punishment solution. We all recognize it from child-rearing: clean up your room or I’ll put you through the wall. Or, in an age of reduced corporal punishment: clean up your room or I’ll ground you: no TV, no iPad, no … whatever.

That will probably work, in that it’s more likely to lead to a society that beats the pandemic than if such a large proportion remains highly susceptible to the virus. But it might backfire in that it leads to a society at war with a significant portion of itself. You are leading, but through fear rather than admiration. It is the world of 1984 envisioned by Orwell, rather than the Brave New World of Huxley.

Getting closer…

As with any other issue, there is a very, very vocal minority among those who have not been vaccinated. They are hardcore, unlikely to be moved.

There are many, many more who have not vaccinated because they couldn’t be bothered or because they’ve read some disturbing bit of propaganda that they immediately believed and that governs their decisions now (e.g. vaccines affect fertility). But they’re not hardcore. They just need to be slipped out of one valence level and into another. They just need a bit of invested energy to achieve the transition.

Energy…or money.

Society wants something from these people. Why don’t we pay them to do what we want?

An immodest proposal[4]

Because that wouldn’t be fair to everyone else, you will immediately say.

That is, of course, a very good point. If you start paying people who didn’t volunteer to help society, you only encourage others to hold out for more money later. Not only have you established a pattern where you reward the most recalcitrant, but you also annoy the overwhelming majority who volunteered without any reward. A bad idea, all around.

But…what if we just paid everyone? That is:

1. We make a “reward” available to everyone who’s already been vaccinated.[5]
2. Anyone who cannot be vaccinated for valid medical reasons qualifies for the reward as well.
3. Then we make the reward available to everyone who schedules a vaccination appointment right now.
4. Finally, we reduce the reward by 5% each week.

The sooner you’re vaccinated, the more reward you get. If you’re already vaccinated, you get the maximum reward. That’s it.[6]

There’s one more question to answer, though.

How much?

Society has a giant problem. It has a solution. It has quite a bit of money. But it also has other problems and other needs as well. It has other priorities. They must all be balanced and it must determine how much value it places on solving this problem efficiently and expeditiously.

There are 8M people in Switzerland, give or take. About 5M have been vaccinated by now (again, give or take).

If the reward were CHF1,000, then that’s 5B Swiss francs to dole out so far, with a cap at 8B when everyone is vaccinated.

That’s just a number I plucked out of thin air because I can multiply 5M by 1,000. When I first thought of this, I said CHF200.- to the friend I always annoy with these ideas. On consideration, I thought it might be a bit low in Switzerland. Regardless of the actual number, there are two questions that are likely to arise:

Is it too little?

This is a country where people have been regularly paying CHF25.- to be tested every 3 days rather than getting a free vaccination. A lot of this can probably be explained by sunken-cost theory, where they’ve committed to their anti-vaccination stance and every CH25.- they spend on it solidifies their position. If they were to change their minds now, then that money will have been wasted. The reward has to be high enough to convince them. It doesn’t have to be crazy-high because a high-enough sum right now has been shown to be quite convincing. I’m not an expert. Consult some marketing professionals and psychologists or both. Maybe ask around.

Is it too much?

Can the Swiss government afford the cost of such a reward program? The answer to this question will come from evaluating what the pandemic is costing Switzerland right now. Just for comparison, the best estimates for the new fighter jets the Swiss military wants is over CHF 6B. 8B to get the pandemic largely under control in Switzerland doesn’t sound exorbitant. It sounds eminently reasonable.