Ohio’s Vax-a-Million Lottery: FAIL

 

FEE (Foundation for Economic Education) published its report “States Spent At Least $90 Million on Vaccine Lotteries. Studies Show They Accomplished Nothing” at The Washington Gazette. And sadly, their lead-off example is Ohio:

Government bureaucrats aren’t exactly known for spending taxpayer money wisely. Sadly, the pandemic has proven no exception—with new studies showing that local governments wasted millions on vaccine lotteries that accomplished…nothing. 

For example, Ohio implemented a “Vax-a-Million” initiative where it drew weekly lotteries for a $1 million prize among those who got the vaccine. Similar programs have cropped up around the country, such as “VaxCash” in Maryland and “Vax and Scratch” in New York. In all, states spent at least $90 million, likely more, Business Insider reports, on these kinds of vaccine lottery efforts.

Given the significant sums involved, it’s worth questioning: Did these pro-vaccine government initiatives actually accomplish their goals? 

The answer provided by a new study published in JAMA Health Forum is a resounding “no.” Researchers examined the 19 states with vaccine lottery schemes and compared them to states that did not enact such programs. The authors conclude that the impact these lotteries had on increasing vaccination rates was “very small in magnitude and statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

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Read the full report here and weep.  If you are so inclined, send Gov. DeWine a message here to let him know what you think of his initiative - maybe include the hyperlink to the FEE report.

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One Option: Do Not Comply

 

Hannah Cox at FEE (Foundation for Economic Education) has an encouraging story on how Americans can resist and choose not to comply with police-state directives:

4 Ways Americans Are Fighting Back Against Anti-Science COVID Restrictions

What’s more American than apple pie? Civil disobedience.

In the US, it would be easy to believe the vast majority of people are in lockstep with the government’s pandemic policies. Networks are aflush with headlines claiming their polls show a majority of Americans support policies like masks and vaccine mandates, and detractors are painted as fringe.

Every good politico knows that, with the right framing, you can get a poll to say anything you want it to. But aside from the unreliable nature of the polls and headlines dominating our airwaves, there is another problem with the media’s reporting: they never seem to elevate stories that tell a counter narrative.

One doesn’t have to look far to find examples of Americans who have simply had enough of the anti-scientific and unconstitutional COVID mandates. We know, and have known for over a year, that the majority of masks in use provide little benefit in warding off the coronavirus. Additionally, studies have shown that mask mandates failed to reduce COVID deaths, hospitalizations, or even cases. And on top of all of that, we consistently see the same leaders who push these unscientific mandates on the rest of us flout the rules whenever it suits their fancy—like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Met Gala or San Francisco Mayor London Breed partying at a local jazz club.

Vaccine mandates present similar problems. Besides being flagrantly unconstitutional and a violation of bodily autonomy, these mandates ignore the natural immunity that millions of people have built up.

The rules only get sillier and more nonsensical from there. . . .

Read the full article here.  

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The lockdowns simply didn’t work

 

Brad Palumbo at FEE (Foundation for Economic Education - h/t Instapundit) confirms what many of us figured out maybe a month into the lockdowns:

We Just Got Even More Proof that
Stay-At-Home Orders Lethally Backfired

A new study finds that lockdown orders didn’t reduce overall mortality, and may have even increased it.

Life under lockdown was hard for all of us. From economic destruction to social isolation, the costs of restrictive government policies intended to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 have been steep. But now, yet another study suggests that the benefits wrought by our collective sacrifice were negligible at best—and that stay-at-home orders may even have increased overall mortality.  

In a new paper, economists from the University of Southern California and the RAND Corporation examined the effectiveness of “shelter-in-place” (SIP) mandates, aka stay-at-home orders, using data from 43 countries and all 50 US states. The experts analyze not just deaths from COVID-19, but “excess deaths,” a measure that compares overall deaths from all causes to a historical baseline. 

The authors explain that lockdown orders may have had lethal unintended consequences in their own right, such as increased drug overdoses, worsened mental health problems, increased child abuse, deadly delays in non-COVID medical care, and more. So, to find out whether stay-at-home orders truly helped more than they hurt, examining excess deaths, not just pandemic outcomes, is key. 

The results aren’t pretty. 

“We fail to find that shelter-in-place policies saved lives,” the authors report. Indeed, they conclude that in the weeks following the implementation of these policies, excess mortality actually increases—even though it had typically been declining before the orders took effect. And across all countries, the study finds that a one-week increase in the length of stay-at-home policies corresponds with 2.7 more excess deaths per 100,000 people.

 

. . .

Read more here.

Flashback:  In July 2020. this blog linked to Heather Mac Donald’s Imprimis article “Four Months of Unprecedented Government Malfeasance”;  click here.

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