COLUMBUS, Ind. — A growing list of companies, including some operating in Bartholomew County, are offering financial and other incentives to encourage their workers to get COVID-19 vaccinations when they are eligible and the vaccine is available.
At least seven local companies have announced some sort of incentive for employees, ranging from one-time payments after getting vaccinated to paid-time off and money for transportation to vaccination sites.
Kroger is offering grocery store associates a one-time $100 payment after they receive their final vaccine dose, the company announced Feb. 5.
Employees at JayC Food Store, which is owned by Kroger, also are eligible for the one-time payment, said Erin Grant, a Kroger spokeswoman.
On Wednesday, Target announced that it will offer hourly employees up to two hours of paid-time off for each vaccine dose and pay up to $15 for Lyft rides for employees to travel to vaccination sites, the company said.
Dollar General, which has several locations in the Columbus area, has said it will give employees a one-time payment equivalent to four hours of pay after they get vaccinated.
Petco, which has a location at 1337 N. National Road in Columbus, said in a statement Wednesday that it would offer store employees a one-time $75 payment after they receive their final vaccine dose.
Aldi has said it is providing two additional hours of pay for each vaccine dose employees receive, while Starbucks is offering two additional hours of paid-time off for each dose.
However, three of the largest employers in the county — Cummins Inc., Columbus Regional Health and the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. — have not yet announced any incentives or have opted to not offer any, at least for the time being.
Cummins, the largest employer in Bartholomew County, is in the process of “developing a vaccine strategy” but no further details were available, said company spokesman Jon Mills.
Josh Burnett, communications coordinator for the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp., said he was unaware of any plans by BCSC to offer incentives at this time.
“When the vaccine becomes more available to teachers, we might be more prepared to make some type of statement or decision on this,” Burnett said.
At the hospital
Columbus Regional Health, which is not requiring staff to get vaccinated, has opted not to provide any financial incentives for staff at this time, besides providing information on the merits of getting vaccinated, said spokeswoman Kelsey DeClue.
Part of the reason for not offering an incentive is that not all CRH employees are currently eligible to get vaccinated under state guidelines, and the hospital system didn’t want to offer an incentive that some staff wouldn’t qualify for, DeClue said.
“For our workforce, we felt that the best thing was to let them make their own informed decision on what was most important to their health and what the employee feels best (and) give them all the tools and information that they need to make a decision and not feel pushed one way or the other,” DeClue said.
The push to vaccinate comes amid signs that some people — even some health care workers — are reluctant to get the vaccinations, contributing to a slower than hoped-for rollout of the mass vaccination effort in the U.S. A shortage of vaccine nationwide is also complicating the equation.
Many companies are still trying to figure out how their employees feel about the taking the shots, with some sending out internal surveys.
A survey of U.S. workers last month by the Society for Human Resource Management, 36% of respondents said they were not likely to get vaccinated, citing concerns about side effects as their main reason, The Associated Press reported.
An The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs poll conducted from Jan. 28 to Feb. 1 found that 67% of U.S. adults plan to get vaccinated or have already done so, while 15% said they definitely won’t get vaccinated, according to wire reports.
Sixty-seven percent is below the threshold that many public health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, have said would need to get vaccinated to reach herd immunity and vanquish the pandemic, which has killed over 476,000 people in the U.S.
Fauci has said between 70% to 85% of the U.S. population needs to get vaccinated to reach herd immunity
As of Friday morning, 9,809 Bartholomew County residents had received their first COVID-19 shot, or 11.7% of the county’s population, and 3,334 had received their second shot and were considered fully vaccinated, or just under 4% of the population, according to the Indiana State Department of Health.
Vaccine testing
Scientists say the vaccines have been rigorously tested on tens of thousands and vetted by independent experts, and there have been no signs of widespread severe side effects from the shots, according to wire reports.
But skepticism persists, particularly among younger people, people without college degrees, Black Americans and Republicans, polls show.
While companies could mandate that workers get COVID-19 vaccines as a requirement for employment, most are reluctant to impose such mandate, according to wire reports.
Additionally, companies that impose a mandate must make accommodations for medical or religious reasons, according to guidance from the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Some economists, however, have gone a few steps further, proposing that the federal government issue direct payments to everyone who gets vaccinated.
Last year, economist Robert Litan, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and former Clinton administration official, proposed paying everyone in the U.S. who gets vaccinated $1,000, which he described in his proposal as “the ‘adult’ version of the doctor handing out candy to children.”
In the proposal, Litan, who concedes that the $1,000 figures is more of a “strong hunch” that anything less “won’t do the trick,” suggests paying $200 once they get vaccinated, but withholding the remaining $800 until the U.S. reaches herd immunity so people will be incentivized to “persuade their family members, neighbors, work colleagues, church members” to get vaccinated.
Litan estimated that it would cost upwards of $275 billion to implement such a plan, but considered it far less than the economic and human toll the pandemic has been taking on the U.S.
One estimate by researchers that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association calculated the total financial cost of the pandemic in the U.S. at $16 trillion, including $7.59 trillion in lost gross domestic product, $4.37 trillion in costs associated with premature death, $2.57 trillion in costs related to long-term health impairment and $1.58 trillion in mental health impairment costs.
“If the nation doesn’t get to herd immunity once the vaccine becomes widely available and has been independently validated, we’re all out of luck: the economy will continue to struggle with a weight on its chest, and American society won’t get back to normal,” Litan said in the proposal.
Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President George W. Bush, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer have endorsed Litan’s proposal.
But others say such a proposal could backfire and have unintended consequences, pointing to studies, including a 2010 study in the journal Social Science & Medicine that suggests that offering “large incentives may encourage participation” in research studies but also alter “their perception of the risk associated with those studies.”
Additionally, it’s unclear the extent to which being paid to get vaccinated would change the minds of people who have expressed concerns about the safety of the vaccines.
In the meantime, the human cost and the damage due to the economy continue to rise.
Ryan Brewer, an associate professor of finance at IUPUC, said the economic damage caused by the pandemic is large and ongoing.
“It’s a big number, and it’s continuing to expand every day.” Brewer said.
