How U.S. Business Support for Vaccines Will Help Their Deployment

• By publicly supporting the vaccine rollout, US companies could help get more people vaccinated.
• Walmart, Disney, Uber, Lyft, the NFL and others help with vaccine administration and education.
• The Biden administration has also partnered with business groups to encourage vaccines and the wearing of masks.
• Visit Insider’s Business section for more stories.

In recent weeks, Walmart has administered about half a million COVID-19 vaccines from its facilities nationwide.

Mass vaccination sites have opened at Disneyland in California and Yankee Stadium in New York City, and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has offered all 30 league stadiums to use as mass vaccination sites.

Uber and Lyft are helping people get to their immunization appointments, and Target will offer paid time off for its employees who want to be immunized.

These efforts represent a new impetus among American business leaders at a crucial time: their economic future depends on the people who get vaccinated.

Reluctance to vaccines

As the vaccine rollout began last year, a predictable problem arose in the United States: vaccine skepticism.

Scientific evidence shows the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, but there is still a portion of Americans who believe the opposite. According to a Gallup poll, the proportion of those who think vaccines are safe and important to administer has declined by 10% over the past 20 years.

There is a segment of the American population that is totally opposed to vaccines – a November Gallup poll found that 12% of respondents “don’t trust vaccines in general.”

But there is a significant percentage who are skeptical of the coronavirus vaccine in particular, citing rushed development or safety as reasons for not wanting to be vaccinated. The same poll found that 42% of people said they would not take the coronavirus vaccine if it was free and available to them, compared to 58% who said they would.

As Insider’s Kelly McLaughlin and Yelena Dzhanova reported last year, experts have sounded the alarm that anti-vaccination concerns could slow the end of the pandemic as it could lead to gaps in immunity. collective. On the flip side, getting the vaccine could massively reduce the risk of infection: A UK study published earlier this week suggested that Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine reduces that risk by more than 70%.

All of this puts the United States in a difficult position: the vaccine is safe and effective, but many Americans don’t believe it. The slow rollout of the vaccine, combined with this reluctance, means the United States is not achieving herd immunity very quickly. This leaves businesses like theme parks, stadiums, and restaurants still closed or only partially open – and away from anything close to a recovery.

But there is hope: By strongly and publicly supporting the vaccine, US companies could help get things back to normal.

The vaccine will be a game-changer for many companies

Some CEOs are already realizing this. Walmart CEO John Furner told NBC News “ Today the company is currently administering 13 million doses per month and he believes Walmart can play an important role in communities that would not otherwise have an easy way to get the vaccine.

Walmart also provides vaccine training to its employees and publicly embraces the benefits of the vaccine.

“We also think it’s important for you to know that your friends or family or peers or others who have received the vaccine are open about this,” Furner said in an interview with Today.

Furner said he intends to get the vaccine when it is his turn and that he encourages his employees to get it too.

Scott Kirby, the CEO of United Airlines – another business that depends on the company returning to some sense of normalcy – told a town hall of employees last month that he not only supports the vaccine, but that it should be mandatory for United employees.

“The worst thing I believe I will ever do in my career is the letters I have written to surviving family members of colleagues we have lost to the coronavirus,” Kirby said, according to Leslie Josephs of CNBC. “And so, for me, because I have confidence in the safety of the vaccine – and I admit it’s controversial – I think the right thing to do is for United Airlines, and for other companies, to require vaccines and make them mandatory. “

United have since said they are considering a mandatory vaccination policy, but have yet to put it into effect.

Disney CEO Bob Chapek announced during the company’s first quarter fiscal year earnings call earlier this month that the company had given 100,000 doses of the vaccine to Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., which had not been open to the public since March of last year.

The closure of the park, along with the suspension of Disney cruise operations and closures of other parks around the world, has had a serious impact on Disney’s business: the company said in its earnings call that earnings operations of its park experiments and product operations had declined “significantly” from the previous year for a loss of $ 119 million.

Chapek said if the vaccines were available to everyone who wanted them by April of this year, it would “be a game-changer” for Disney, giving people “the confidence they need to come back to the parks.”

Chapek stopped short of fully approving the vaccine, but his message was clear: the vaccine is what Disney parks need to return to a degree of normalcy.

A new Biden administration partnership

Still, a handful of CEOs endorsing the need for a vaccine does not match a unified push by U.S. companies to get the country vaccinated, or even to promote basic health and safety measures. Andy Slavitt, a White House pandemic adviser, told David Leonhardt of the New York Times this week that it had something to do with the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus.

Slavitt said what businesses can do now is help with messaging. Masks and the vaccine have become politicized, but employers may be able to break down some of these barriers because the message may be received differently from your boss than from a politician. He told The Times that companies should tell employees to wear masks, avoid crowds and get vaccinated when it’s their turn.

And now we can start to see more companies speaking out. The Biden administration on Friday announced a new partnership with business leaders and groups such as the American Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers, as well as leaders from the Black, Latino and Black business community. Asian.

The partnership aims to reach out to businesses across the country, encouraging them to promote the value of getting vaccinated and wearing a mask. The new partnership will also encourage companies to offer bonuses to employees or paid time off to get vaccinated and mandate masks and social distancing in their establishments.

While the government isn’t prescribing if and how businesses get involved, it will clarify how they can help – and it looks like there’s a lot of interest in American businesses.

“We have been overwhelmed by the awareness of companies that say, ‘We want to help, we want to help, we want to help,” Slavitt told The Times. “What a missed opportunity the first year of this virus.”