Humor

U.S. Government Issues New Vaccine Incentives

A report on the latest government outreach to the non-vaccinated. Art/Photo Request: Promotional Vaccine Poster - “just do it”

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Cover Image
By Reya Miller

Since the release of the COVID vaccine, the greater American government has done its part to educate the public and encourage them to get the vaccine. This has come in the form of advertisements—on TV, in the mail, and basically anywhere you look in any metropolitan area. However, it seems that governmental vaccine promoters may have overestimated the effectiveness of their syndication, being that, as of late, there have been increasing reports of people who outright refuse the vaccine! As a result, the government has felt a need to introduce an abundance of incentives, offering exciting rewards for getting the shot.

The general population has deemed a number of recent vaccine incentives too specific, overly general, or perhaps downright unusable. Some of these include:

Circa 1996 PVC pipes

Sticky hands

A ten-dollar discount for ‘Justin Beeber’ concerts (no relation)

A coupon for ‘Big John’s Hayride,’ a local attraction in southern Montana

A local Virginia congressman stated: “We don’t know what to give them anymore. At this point, we’re literally going through our closets to find something these people might want.”

In New York City, the state mails free subway tokens to vaccinated individuals, being a surplus from the past incentives for the polio vaccine.

Furthermore, American schools have felt the impact of a new wave of in-person students, and with them a new wave of potential viral spread. To combat the lack of vaccination in adolescents, the Department of Education has partnered with state governments to bring in a new line of teen-focused vaccination incentives. The most advertised of which include:

Tube socks

Assorted caramels

A one-time free pass to the “Disco Palace,” a roller skating rink that closed in 2005

Plush syringes

What kind of people, you may ask, would outright refuse a potentially life-saving cure for the deadliest virus in years? Stanford’s Clinical Virology Department may have answers, based upon their most recent paper on the subject. The paper classifies these individuals as a combination of:

Self-called ‘Zombie Survivalists’

Rant-prone uncles

High school students (during midterm season)

And finally, the entire celebrity population of Los Angeles

Due to the lattermost section, the Department of the Treasury has devoted an entire wing of the U.S. Mint to produce Oscars, which have been added, en masse, to the list of incentives.

On the topic of people who refuse to get vaccinated, journalists have uncovered an online ring of “Vaccine Truthers” or “Vacc-Truthers” or “V’uthers” who subscribe to the belief that vaccines turn people into aliens that only they can see. Despite its blatant absurdity, this conspiracy has made its way across the globe, with the construction of V’utheran churches in Kamchatka, Central India, and London. This development has been recognized by data scientists as the foremost federally recognized reasons why people reject the shot, followed closely by: ‘planned for next week,’ ‘not home,’ and ‘overwhelmed by the wide variety of vaccine incentives.’

Finally, the latest incentive, or perhaps threat, of them all, issued by the Federal government of the United States at 8:00 a.m. today: “Listen, guys, if you keep refusing to get vaccinated, you leave us no choice. Prohibition’s coming back.”