Vaccine hunters and jostlers may have hurt the COVID-19 vaccination effort

Abstract

We examine how salience of extreme actions to gain access to vaccines affect general vaccine preferences using a survey experiment conducted shortly after a limited supply of COVID-19 vaccines were made available to prioritized groups. We document that learning about people who jump the line (jostlers) or people who go through great lengths to secure left-over vaccine doses (hunters) is off-putting, and has a meaningful, negative effect on people’s vaccine preferences. Most people, however, predict the opposite—that news about extreme behavior would help the vaccination effort. If policy makers or public health authorities share these incorrect beliefs, they run the risk of implementing information policies that backfire in their effort to signal desirability of the vaccine.