I don’t pretend to understand what these people are thinking but if they can be persuaded to try to help save lives (potentially including their own) by offering them a free beer then do it!
The idea of getting vaccinated had been rolling around in the back of Tyler Morsch’s mind for weeks. As a 28-year-old, he didn’t feel in any particular danger, but he finally decided he should start looking for a Covid-19 vaccination clinic this week. Then he heard the magic words.
“Free beer,” he said.
Saturday was the first day that Erie County worked with a local microbrewery to host its Shot and a Chaser program, offering individuals who got their first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine at Resurgence Brewing Company a free pint glass and coupon for the vaccinated person’s drink of choice.
Under normal circumstances, it would be beyond strange for a brewery to host a vaccination clinic in the shadow of 1,000-gallon fermentation tanks, with a brick wall separating a bustling bar service from health care professionals handling syringes filled with the Moderna vaccine. But these are not normal times.
“Given the world we live in right now, it’s not so weird,” said Ben Kestner, Resurgence Brewing’s director of taproom operations.
County Executive Mark Poloncarz, who was nursing his own drink in one hand while directing vaccine recipients to open table with the other, was happy to see the county’s first Shot and a Chaser effort going so well. Before the vaccinations started at 11 a.m., there was a line out the door.
As demand for the Covid-19 vaccine continues to fall, the county is taking a new approach. It’s offering free beer.
Programs like the Shot and a Chaser program are among the more creative outreach efforts to try and attract individuals who would otherwise not consider vaccination a priority, especially younger adults. New Jersey and Suffolk County have picked up on the idea, offering free drink vouchers at participating breweries for those who agree to get vaccinated.
Poloncarz said he’s happy to see others pick up the idea.
“We’re going to do more people today at our first-dose clinics than most of our first-dose clinics in the last week combined,” Poloncarz said. “It’s been a success. We figured it would be pretty good, but now we’re seeing the results.”
That’s not a very high bar, given that many of the county’s first-dose clinics have had less than two dozen people show up. At one site, only one person showed up, Poloncarz said. Comparatively, more than 100 people had been vaccinated at Resurgence by mid-afternoon, including some walk-ups and restaurant patrons who decided to get the vaccine at the spur of the moment.
Health Commissioner Dr. Gale Burstein, who was also on site to vaccinate individuals, said she walked from table to table earlier in the day to recruit people who hadn’t gotten vaccinated yet. At one table, one woman who hadn’t been vaccinated agreed to get a shot after everyone else at the table told her she should.
I noted this response in a story I saw last weekend about offering free tickets to a museum in NY City. A huge number of people in this country are apathetic, uninformed and uninvolved in any kind of civic activity. Many of them are young and healthy and they are just living their lives without much regard to anything outside their immediate bubble. It’s not that they’re against the vaccine or are even “hesitant” They just don’t see any urgency and they don’t really care or understand that they can be vectors for the virus so they just go about their lives.
These people can be reached by offering them something they want in return for getting vaccinated. And as this shows, it doesn’t have to be expensive. A free beer, some free tickets, a coupon for something, whatever. They just need something to spur them to get it that has nothing to do with being a responsible citizen, which just isn’t on their radar screen.