The debate is launched to find out whether it is preferable to impose a health contribution on those who have not been vaccinated or to extend the application of the vaccination passport.
Posted yesterday at 12:00 p.m.
Beyond the legal dimension of the health contribution or the right or not to impose the vaccination passport (in the name of freedom), the question can be analyzed from the point of view of economics.
We can think that the objective of the government is to limit risky contacts within the population. How to proceed? The government has two types of tools. It can regulate to increase the “price” of risky contacts, or it can act to directly limit the “quantity” of risky contacts.
On the one hand, the price of high-risk contacts can be increased by imposing a health contribution on those who have not been vaccinated. Some will then decide to get vaccinated, others will not. Contacts at risk will then be reduced.
On the other hand, we can directly limit risky contacts by extending the vaccination passport. Obviously, such a policy will have a direct effect on the number of high-risk contacts, either by encouraging some non-vaccinated people to get vaccinated, or by keeping them away from the places targeted.
Obviously, ultimately, both types of intervention aim to reduce risky contacts, but the nature of the intervention differs.
In an ideal world without uncertainty, it is easy to estimate the regulatory parameters that would achieve the established goal of reducing risky contacts. Thus, the two types of intervention – the health contribution or the broader application of the vaccine passport – would lead to the same result.
On the other hand, in an uncertain world, it is not easy to choose the right parameters, and the risk of error is great. It is therefore necessary to choose the tool that will minimize this risk of error.
The challenge of price intervention is to find the “right” price. What is the optimal health contribution that will ensure that enough unvaccinated people will decide to get vaccinated: $100, $500, $1000? Difficult to measure, because we do not know the will of the non-vaccinated to remain so.
Thus, such a price-based approach runs the risk of not achieving the objective of reducing risky contacts and of generating major errors.
An intervention on the quantity is low-risk because it is relatively easy to know the effects of the extent of the vaccination passport on the induced reduction in risk contacts. By extending the vaccine passport, the risk of intervention error is relatively low.
Thus, from a strictly economic point of view, extending the application of the vaccine passport is the tool that minimizes intervention errors and allows the government to effectively achieve its objective of limiting risky contacts. It should therefore be preferred to the health contribution.