Most countries around the world can’t get enough Covid-19 vaccines for their people. But in Hong Kong, the government may have to throw away a million or more doses as they are near their expiry dates. Why? Because most locals don’t want to take the shot, or at least not to have to make the extra effort to get a booking. It’s not like they are being forced to take the Chinese Sinovac to prove their patriotism. Germany’s BioNTech, which uses the latest technology involving mRNA, is readily available. Still, there have been few takers. After three months, still only about 17 per cent of the population have taken their first dose, and a little over 12 per cent have received their second shot. To be sure, “vaccine hesitancy” happens in other places, too ; well, mostly in developed countries such as the United States and Britain, where many of their citizens are also offered their own choices of vaccine. But no, they say, I have the right, and/or the medical knowledge, to choose not to be vaccinated. These are the same places where the anti-vaccine movements, such as those against the childhood MMR jab against measles, mumps and rubella, are most powerful. If this is not decadence, I don’t know what is. But in Hong Kong, we can always blame the government. It didn’t provide proper information. Booking and queuing are too inconvenient. And, “we just don’t trust the government!” What is there to trust? It’s the BioNTech-Pfizer brand. It doesn’t help that some popular newsprint and online news sites have been running non-stop stories, both locally and from overseas, about medical complications and deaths that may or may not be related to the Covid-19 vaccines . Some anonymous “yellow” or anti-government groups have been advocating vaccine refusal as an act of resistance! Unfortunately, the mRNA vaccines have to be stored at very low temperatures and expire more quickly than conventional vaccines. So the Hong Kong government now faces the dilemma of either having to donate, resell or discard about a million of the BioNTech doses – unless they can get more people to take the shot before the mid-August deadline. In the US, Ohio, Maryland and New York are launching multimillion-dollar lotteries to encourage more people to be inoculated. Researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have found that such “gambling” schemes do work. Hong Kong, take a cue from the Americans.