While South Carolina was preparing to distribute meager doses of the new coronavirus vaccine last month, dozens of companies and commercial groups twisted the governor’s ear to request a spot near the beginning of the line.
More than 60 industry associations, individual companies and advocacy groups have asked SC Governor Henry McMaster’s office to inoculate their workforce in Phase 1 of the vaccine’s launch in the state, according to documents obtained by the Post and Courier through a request for open records. Many of them ended up in Phase 1, shows the state’s vaccination plan.
Giants like Amazon, rideshare companies Uber and Lyft and government agencies like the State Ports Authority and US Postal Service have joined the crowd, looking for priority locations for their thousands of employees in South Carolina. The same has happened with companies minors, such as Renewable Water Resources, a water and sewage company that wanted doses for 130 of its workers in the interior of the state.
Many of the groups reinforced their requests detailing how the economy would be affected if their workers became ill or why their employees are at a greater risk of contracting the deadly respiratory disease.
UPS noted that its employees are helping to distribute the vaccine. The National Association of Waste and Recycling has requested doses for employees who handle medical waste, noting past outbreaks of the highly contagious coronavirus among solid waste workers in Baltimore and Philadelphia.
Most made it clear that they were not asking to jump ahead of frontline health professionals, who, along with nursing home residents, are the state’s top priority for new vaccines.
The letters flooded the Governor’s Office at a critical juncture last month, when the question of how to prioritize the first batch of shots was a point of consternation in states across the country.
Earlier this month, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo went so far as to threaten legal consequences for anyone who skipped the line inappropriately.
More recently, however, concerns about how to prioritize injections have given way to concerns that South Carolina is not getting enough of the doses and is slow to administer the doses it already has.
South Carolina received just over 450,000 doses of the vaccine and administered about 279,000 of them, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Public health experts estimate that about three quarters of the state’s 5 million residents will need to be vaccinated to obtain collective immunity.
The governor was closely involved in deciding how the SC Department of Health and Environmental Control would prioritize the first batches of the new vaccine, said McMaster spokesman Brian Symmes. But Symmes said those choices were not made on the basis of letters sent by companies to McMaster’s office.
“The governor appreciates the type of communication in our business community,” said Symmes. “This is consistent with the way he did things in the past. He wants to hear about your concerns. He wants to hear the challenges they are facing. “
Path to protection
SC companies see inoculating their employees as the best way to eliminate infections and exposures that close facilities and sometimes leave employees without work for the past 11 months, said SC Chamber of Commerce CEO Swati Patel, on Monday.
These hiccups have slowed supply chains, said Patel. “The first thing we can do to get our economy back on track is to vaccinate people as quickly as possible, including our workers,” she said.
The companies repeated this argument over and over again in letters to McMaster’s office last month. Some of the letters came from the same groups that wrote to McMaster last spring asking for special exemptions from the governor’s closing orders before he even issued them.
At the time, more than 430 small stores, large manufacturers, corporate giants and trade associations wrote to the Governor’s Office asking that their employees be considered “essential” so that they could remain open. Pet salons, recreational vehicle dealerships, florists, archery stores and other companies were creative in explaining why they should stay open, even when South Carolina sought to limit meetings and curb the spread of COVID-19.
This time, companies limited themselves to a few common themes.
Last month, SC Trucking Association CEO Rick Todd wrote that truck drivers will help distribute the vaccine bottles. But his job could be delayed if the terminals were to be shut down when workers tested positive for COVID-19, he wrote.
“Our nation’s ability to successfully tackle the COVID-19 pandemic depends on the resilience and integrity of our transportation networks,” wrote Todd.
A joint letter from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the North American Meat Institute and the National Pork Producers Council emphasized the importance of its members to the country’s food supply. Uber and Lyft mentioned their work transporting essential workers during the pandemic and distributing meals to quarantined people at home.
Other industries emphasized its importance to the American public during the pandemic.
In a joint letter, the SC Press Association and SC Broadcasters Association argued that journalists have played a vital role in distributing information about COVID-19, while at the same time putting themselves at risk when going out to interview health professionals. and patients, covering rallies and reporting on their communities.
Associations of Internet and telecommunications companies have pointed to their workers’ efforts to keep Americans connected while working and attending school remotely.
Facing risks
Still, some companies have highlighted the risks their employees face every day in jobs that cannot be done at home.
The Association of Funeral Directors of SC has successfully requested the vaccination of funeral directors in Phase 1A together with health professionals. The group argued that its workforce deals with the bodies of people who died of COVID-19 and interacts with surviving family members who may also have been exposed.
“Death aid professionals face the same risk of exposure to COVID-19 as health professionals when entering hospitals, nursing homes and homes to take the body of a deceased to their care,” wrote Brad Evans, the group’s president .
Reached on Monday, the director of the funeral home Abbeville said the Governor’s Office was understanding the request. “A large part” of the state’s 950 funeral directors and embalmers received their first doses, Evans said.
South Carolina is still in Phase 1A of its launch, distributing the vaccine to frontline health workers, nursing home residents and the elderly. Phase 1A is expected to last until next month. It includes about 987,000 people, almost a fifth of the state’s population.
The state will then move on to Phase 1B, inoculating some 573,500 essential workers, including firefighters, police, prison guards, food and agriculture workers, manufacturers, grocery workers, teachers and US Postal workers.
Phase 1C, defined for “late spring”, includes people with underlying health conditions that make them more vulnerable to COVID-19 and other types of essential workers, including those in transportation and logistics, food service, construction housing and finance, communications, media, law and energy.
It covers about 2.9 million people, more than half of the state’s population.