California giving away $4.5 million in Six Flags tickets for vaccinations

I recently encountered someone who suggested that people who got vaccinated right away were "virtue signaling." 🤦‍♂️

I saw a couple hiking in Zion that had shirts on that said "Vaccinated: You're welcome". Now THAT'S virtue signaling. lol...

Anyhow, $4.5 million could buy a ticket for the entire state of California with how cheap Six Flags is...

Second prize is a season pass.

Wake me when it’s a million bucks.

I just don't understand this at all.

Here we're still in a situation where demand radically exceeds supply. They're distributing in descending age groups, and those under the age of 40 are not yet eligible.

At current rates I'd be surprised if we ran out of people to vaccinate this year.

Your country is broken.

I'm curious in which respect you think the USA is broken:

- We have so many people reluctant to get the vaccine that we have to incent them with stupid prizes.

- We have bought up so much of the world supply of vaccine that we're handing doses out like a child molester handing out candy on a street corner while our friend and neighbor countries can only watch and wait.

- Both of the above.

- Something else.

(C and D are not mutually exclusive. I probably wouldn't disagree with any of your choices, although I might use a word other than "broken" for B.)

Well if we still had lockdowns and capacity restrictions I think more people would be lining up to get vaccinated but even the most lock downy population centers are back to normal life and the daily numbers continue to decline dramatically.

That's the thing, in some states, they gave up months early, which certainly enabled those who doubted the severity of the pandemic licence to reinforce that doubt. Knowing that asymptomatic infection was a serious problem, the same people likely spread it around, and we have 600k people dead in the US.

A non-trivial number of people never wanted to play along to mitigate the problem, and now that we have an effective out, they still don't want to play along. That's pretty broken.

Tangentially, I was thinking about how many tickets this actually is. Assuming they calculated the headline number using the "rack rate" of $89.99, that works out to 50,000 passes, which is ... not a huge number (I don't really fault them for that, it's a good gesture).

But in looking up that price, I found the price of a season pass is $79.99. In other words, less than the stated one-day admission. Granted, you'd probably not only have to be a fool, you'd have to try pretty hard to pay $90 to get in. Still, that just seems stone cold crazy to me.

As soon as I was fully vaccinated, I felt a great sense of freedom. A weight was lifted. I could go to a public place like an amusement park and not even have to think about social distancing and masks. I didn't have to try to not get a deadly disease that has killed so many people.

And I think that's the point of offering an incentive like free theme park tickets to those who get vaccinated. I just don't think it works the way they thought it would. People who are reluctant to get vaccinated are going to go out in public anyway and take the chance. They simply do not care either way.

And now that a lot of people are vaccinated, and the vaccines are readily available to anyone who wants them (in my area at least,) I don't care whether someone does or does not decide to get vaccinated. Now that their choices do not affect me, I don't care.

Just thinking about the sweet freedom of not having to worry about getting Coronavirus anymore makes me feel so good. America!