Are we moving from a pandemic to an endemic situation with COVID-19? There is still debate on this issue, but there is consensus on the key role that vaccines play in our path out of the pandemic.

One of the problems is that in many countries, significant segments of the population are reluctant to get vaccinated. In some places, various incentives were introduced in 2021 to convince the undecided—some of them quite unusual, as noted by the website gzeromedia, part of the global political consulting firm Eurasia. Here are three of them:

In the Philippine town of San Luis, everyone who gets vaccinated is entered into a monthly raffle where the grand prize is a cow, which is delivered to the winner's doorstep personally by the town mayor.

Goldsmiths in the city of Rajkot, in the state of Gujarat, India, joined forces to open a vaccination center that offered a gold nose pin as a prize for women and a hand mixer for men.

The state of Washington, in the U.S., offered a free marijuana cigarette to anyone 21 or older who could prove they had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. Washington was the first state to legalize cannabis in 2021.