Tyson Foods hits 91 percent vaccination rate two months after mandate announced

Nearly two months after announcing a vaccine mandate for its employees, a top official at Tyson Foods revealed that 91 percent of its workforce is now fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

Claudia Coplein, the chief medical officer for Tyson Foods, told The New York Times in an interview that 91 percent of its 120,000 U.S. employees are fully inoculated.

Additionally, 91 percent of 31,000 of the company’s unionized employees are fully vaccinated.

While the company did not release specific information regarding inoculation rates by type of worker, Coplein told the Times “certainly the vaccination rate amongst our frontline workers was lower than our office-based workers at the beginning of this.”

Tyson announced last month that it would be requiring all of its employees in the U.S. to get vaccinated against COVID-19 by the fall. The company said all employees in offices had to be inoculated by Oct. 1, and all other employees would have to receive their shot by Nov. 1.

As part of the mandate, the company said it will give vaccinated front line workers up to 20 hours of paid sick leave.

United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, which helped broker the deal for 26,000 of Tyson’s workers, said paid sick leave is “critical to ensuring workers can get vaccinated without losing a paycheck.”

Before the mandate was announced, less than half of Tyson’s workforce was vaccinated, according to the Times.

Coplein mentioned the threat from misinformation in stymying vaccination rates, telling the Times, “It’s important to recognize that misinformation is out there.”

“The most powerful conversations have been when I sat down with somebody who was scared or emotional or otherwise hesitant to get the vaccine … and they just really needed somebody to listen to them with empathy,” she added.

Tyson Foods made headlines earlier in the pandemic when a number of its meatpacking plants experienced COVID-19 outbreaks. Supervisors at a pork processing plant in Waterloo, Iowa, were also criticized after placing bets on how many workers would become ill with the virus.

The company fired seven managers from the plant in December after an independent investigation was conducted.