Corporate Covid Cowardice

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The first Emergency Use Authorization for a vaccine against Covid-19 came last December 11. That was nine months ago—long enough to make a baby!

Yet only yesterday did we have the first full-court press by anyone with real national power to get everybody vaccinated. President Biden reportedly pulled out all the stops of presidential power, including the rulemaking power of OSHA over the safety and health of private workplaces, to mandate vaccinations. Unless they have valid medical or religious reasons for refusing to be vaccinated, workers in the military, federally-supported jobs and even private businesses of more than 100 employees soon will have to take the shots or find other work. It’s about time!

Coincidentally, the contagious delta variant was also first identified last December, in India. Of course it took a few months to recognize how quickly it would spread around the world and how contagious it was. But it seems clear, in retrospect, that the best approach to saving people and (because people are customers) the economy was getting all hands on deck to be vaccinated. That strategy might have avoided most, if not all, of this summer’s and fall’s big Covid hit to the economy, not to mention tens of thousands of unnecessary infections, hospitalizations and deaths.

What was by far the primary reason for this deadly and economy-killing delay? It was politics. It was not just the sensible politics of reasonable political differences. It was the politics of science denial, heads in the sand, and jinned-up artificial rage. It was getting millions of ordinary people to refuse a vaccine that could save their lives and avoid the suffering and death of their loved ones and co-workers, in the name of the “freedom” to do whatever the hell they please. It was a Republican Party that put brand differentiation—by whatever means and for whatever absurd purpose—above the people’s health and welfare. It was a movement that made the Luddites and the Know Nothings of old look like paragons of Reason.

One of the most disappointing things about this malevolently manufactured delay in mass vaccination was the role that business played in it. I’ll bet that, in the corporate suites and the boards of directors of the Fortune 500 companies, over 90% of those medically eligible got vaccinated within 90 days of that December 11 start date. (Some enterprising reporter or researcher should gather these statistics ASAP.)

How can I be confident? Because all the professors, scientists, technologists, lawyers and others in my own personal milieu got vaccinated as soon as they could. The retired among us spent hours or days on the phone tracking down the quickest way to get vaccinated. Some got in our cars and drove for hours to get the shots as quickly as we could. My wife and I drove over forty miles to a town we’d never visited to get our first Moderna shot, then found a much closer place to get the second shot four weeks later.

The high executives of big corporations are no less intelligent and informed than we and probably more self-protective; and they have/had much greater resources to locate and command their shots. But what did all these captains of industry do publicly, while undoubtedly scarfing up vaccines for themselves and their families?

They pandered to the mob. Fearing being called out and maybe losing customers, they kept silent. Many, if not most, refused to mandate vaccination among their employees, for God’s sake, let alone their customers. The “leaders” of corporate America ducked their public-health and common-sense responsibilities and refused to lead.

As a result, I have avoided (among many other things) traveling by air since my last pre-pandemic plane flight on February 26, 2020. I’m not getting on a plane again until all crew and passengers must show evidence of full vaccination, must wear masks (preferably N-95s handed out at the door) during the entire flight, and will even be nagged to wear them properly, not dropped below their noses.

I’m still waiting for a single airline to break ranks and do the right thing, while at least seven cruise lines have mandated vaccinations for all passengers and crew. And therein lies the riddle. Why did so many corporate leaders (outside the cruise industry) fail to do the right thing for their employees, their customers, and ultimately their own businesses?

Let’s suppose, for a moment, that my reasonable conjecture is true—that 90% or more of execs and directors in America’s corporate suites got themselves and their families vaccinated within 90 days of vaccine availability. Why not urge or require something similar for their customers?

The answer is unlikely to be business savvy. I doubt any airline, for example, did a marketing survey or even had the time to do so. If one had, it might have found that people like me, who grabbed the chance to be vaccinated, travel by plane (or did before the pandemic) at least a half-dozen round trips per year, while the sort of people claiming “rights” to be infected and infectious maybe traveled once, for example, to trash the Capitol on January 6.

There is, of course, a bit of speculation in this point. But nowhere have I read of any careful marketing studies, or any data gathering, to justify the near-universal cowardice of corporate leaders in the face of blindly irrational resistance to common-sense public-health measures. Corporate leaders’ AWOL status in the biggest public-health crisis in a century deserves, at a minimum, massive socio-economic and political research.

Can we expect better now? I hope so. President Biden’s all-fronts push on vaccination and masking may be much like the naïve child pointing out the last Emperor’s absence of clothing. At very least, it will give timid corporate leaders “cover” for doing the right thing for their employees, their customers, and their businesses. The big question that needs answering is why and how these far-sighted men and women, who together built the strongest economy in human history, lacked the courage to do anything similar each on his or her own. The question is why, at this critical time, our corporate leaders acted like deer caught in the headlights of obviously irrational demagoguery.

CODA: I am no left-wing basher of corporations. I have written several essays on this blog (including this one on the often-unacknowledged upside of corporate “rule” and this one on the downside) about the increasing entrenchment of large corporations on the traditional domains of government. As our society, science and technology grow increasingly more complex and specialized, increasing corporate domination of the details of daily life is only natural. But with that domination comes increasing corporate responsibility, including responsibility for the public welfare.

In its initial response to Covid and its later response to vaccination, corporate America dismally failed both the test of responsibility and the test of common sense. It behooves us all to find out why, in detail, and consider how that failure can be corrected. As the very corporate development of the “miracle” mRA vaccines (Moderna’s and Pfizer’s) shows, a modern society cannot always count on government alone to do all that its people need for survival.

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