Megastudy shows that reminders boost vaccination but adding free rides does not

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Milkman, Katherine L.; Ellis, Sean F.; Gromet, Dena M.; Jung, Youngwoo; Luscher, Alex S.; Mobarak, Rayyan S.; Paxson, Madeline K.; Zumaran, Ramon A. Silvera; Kuan, Robert; Berman, Ron; Lewis Jr, Neil A.; List, John A.; Patel, Mitesh S.; Van den Bulte, Christophe; Volpp, Kevin G.; Beauvais, Maryann V.; Bellows, Jonathon K.; Marandola, Cheryl A.; Duckworth, Angela L.
• 署名单位: University of Pennsylvania; University of Pennsylvania; University of Pennsylvania; University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; University of Pennsylvania; Cornell University; University of Chicago; University of Pennsylvania; University of Pennsylvania; University of Pennsylvania
• 刊物名称: Nature
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0028-4144
• DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07591-x
• 发表日期: 2024-07-04
• 关键词: pluripotent stem-cells; primordial germ-cell; dna methylation; tet proteins; induction; specification; fate; gene; identification; trophoblast

摘要

Encouraging routine COVID-19 vaccinations is likely to be a crucial policy challenge for decades to come. To avert hundreds of thousands of unnecessary hospitalizations and deaths, adoption will need to be higher than it was in the autumn of 2022 or 2023, when less than one-fifth of Americans received booster vaccines1,2. One approach to encouraging vaccination is to eliminate the friction of transportation hurdles. Previous research has shown that friction can hinder follow-through3 and that individuals who live farther from COVID-19 vaccination sites are less likely to get vaccinated4. However, the value of providing free round-trip transportation to vaccination sites is unknown. Here we show that offering people free round-trip Lyft rides to pharmacies has no benefit over and above sending them behaviourally informed text messages reminding them to get vaccinated. We determined this by running a megastudy with millions of CVS Pharmacy patients in the United States testing the effects of (1) free round-trip Lyft rides to CVS Pharmacies for vaccination appointments and (2) seven different sets of behaviourally informed vaccine reminder messages. Our results suggest that offering previously vaccinated individuals free rides to vaccination sites is not a good investment in the United States, contrary to the high expectations of both expert and lay forecasters. Instead, people in the United States should be sent behaviourally informed COVID-19 vaccination reminders, which increased the 30-day COVID-19 booster uptake by 21% (1.05 percentage points) and spilled over to increase 30-day influenza vaccinations by 8% (0.34 percentage points) in our megastudy. More rigorous testing of interventions to promote vaccination is needed to ensure that evidence-based solutions are deployed widely and that ineffective but intuitively appealing tools are discontinued. Contrary to expectations, offers of free transportation to vaccine sites did not increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake more than text message reminders, a finding that has implications for future policy decision-making to promote vaccination.