Have you received vaccines against COVID-19?
This is what the vast majority of companies will ask their employees, according to a new survey of CEOs in the United States
91% of the 140 CEOs surveyed said their companies will ask workers to inform them once workers have been vaccinated, according to the KPMG survey, the global tax, advisory and accounting firm.
This question will be part of the new normal, as COVID-19 cases are declining and vaccination rates in the U.S. continue to rise, according to Tuesday’s survey. All CEOs surveyed by KPMG’s parent companies earning annual revenues of at least $ 500 million.
Just over half of CEOs (52%) said they expected business to return to normal in the fall or winter of 2021. Another 29% said it would take some time next year, while another 19% said the business will change forever.
As of Tuesday, nearly a third of American adults had received at least one dose of the two-shot vaccines manufactured by Modern MRNA,
or the Pfizer PFE vaccine,
and BioNTech BNTX,
according to a tracker from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Just over 17% have been completely vaccinated, the CDC tracker said.
Johnson & Johnson JNJ,
the feature that has also received emergency use authorization is a single-dose vaccine.
The KPMG survey indicates that many companies will want to know the vaccination status of their employees, and guidelines from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunities Commission indicate that employers can generally demand vaccinations.
The federal workplace regulator’s guidelines “make it very clear that employers have the law on their side,” Sahar Aziz, a professor at Rutgers Law School who specializes in job discrimination, told MarketWatch.
The exception to this mandate, Aziz added, are workers with a “sincere religious belief” against vaccinations or workers with disabilities who prevent them from inoculating.
Employers can ask about a worker’s vaccination status because it is not a disability-related issue in the circumstances, according to law firm Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr. The person’s response “does not necessarily reveal the employee’s medical condition,” the firm said. There could be many reasons why a person has not yet received the vaccine, the firm’s lawyers said.
On the one hand, a worker may not yet have access to the vaccine.
Half of the CEOs surveyed by KPMG said their biggest concern was that access to policy and vaccination in different countries would hamper the effort to vaccinate staff. For example, European countries have struggled in their own vaccination efforts.
One-third of CEOs were concerned that their staff would not be vaccinated due to safety misinformation.
In the United States, fewer people are waiting and hesitation is weakening, according to polls. 22% of people surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation’s health policy think tank in February fell into the “wait and see” category, down from 31% in January to 39% in December.
A Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month said 69% of Americans intend to receive their shots or have already been vaccinated. This accounts for 60% of people who said in November that they planned to get vaccinated.