Vaccine hunters and jostlers

Desperate times call for desperate measures. But it remains unknown how private citizens’ extreme behavior to self-protect interacts with public health efforts. We conducted a survey experiment shortly after a limited supply of COVID-19 vaccines were made available to prioritized groups, and examined how salience of extreme actions to gain access to vaccines affect general vaccine preferences. 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 may have 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 public health authorities share such beliefs, they run the risk of implementing information policies that backfire.