LOS ANGELES (KNX) — United Airlines, with its workforce of nearly 70,000 employees worldwide, hasn’t had a single COVID-related death among staff in eight weeks, according to CEO Scott Kirby.
Kirby credits that with the company issuing one of the strictest vaccine mandates among U.S. transit carriers. United employees must be vaccinated against COVID-19 or be terminated. More than 96% of the workforce has received both vaccine shots, the company disclosed.
Kirby told CNBC that prior to the vaccine mandate, at least one United employee died from the virus per week on average.
“But now we’ve gone eight straight weeks with zero COVID-related deaths among our vaccinated employees,” he said. “Based on United’s prior experience and the nationwide data related to COVID fatalities among the unvaccinated, this means there are approximately [eight to ten] United employees who are alive today because of our vaccine requirement.”
Dr. Arthur Caplan, founding head of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, predicts more companies will follow suit and implement their own corporate vaccine mandates.
“I think you’re going to see some effort to push the Biden mandate through big employers,” he told KNX. “I do think we’re going to see a lot of businesses say, to work here, you’ve got to do this.”
United’s announcement comes as the country awaits a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to either uphold or do away with a federal vaccine mandate.
Caplan told KNX companies like United weighed the risks of losing employees through resignations in response to a vaccine mandate against losing employees to death from COVID.
“He knows what it means to have employees dying of a disease,” Caplan said of Kirby. “He also knows that if you get three shots, the booster, people just don’t die. That is the wonder of those vaccines. They let you survive with maybe moderate symptoms, but without death.”
Caplan said a company that fails to mandate vaccines for employees is engaging in unethical practices if 100% of the workforce is not working from home. “Short of that, yeah, I think you want to make the workplace safe — you want to tell people to wear hard hats, you want to tell people to wear ear plugs if they need them, you want the air they breathe to not be poisonous, and you want a healthy workforce by getting them vaccinated.”
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