Weekend Update, June 5

Hot takes, fast

Haven’t done one of these in a while but had a little more time.

Flu shot lottery

One thing we’ve seen a number of states experiment with, seemingly successfully, is the idea of using lotteries to incentivize getting Covid-19 vaccines. This seems to me like an idea worth expanding to annual flu shots.

Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, flu shots are now free for anyone who wants one. And some enlightened employers, like Vox Media, actually bring nurses into the office to make it very convenient for people to get their shots. The flu vaccination has positive externalities — you benefit from me getting vaccinated, and I benefit from you getting vaccinated — so the proper price for something like that isn’t $0; it should be less than zero. The problem is that while the social value of getting a flu shot is real, it’s not like super high. A program to pay every American $2 to get a flu shot would be kind of lame. But if you had a six week period during which every Sunday, 50 recent flu sho…