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 "Today I'm calling on more employers to act," Biden said.
"My message is: Require your employees to get vaccinated. With
vaccinations, we're going to beat this pandemic finally. Without
them, we face endless months of chaos in our hospitals, damage to
our economy and anxiety in our schools."
Biden last month ordered all federal workers and contractors to be
vaccinated, and for private employers with 100 or more workers to
require staff to be vaccinated by Dec. 8, or get tested for the
coronavirus weekly. That order covers 100 million people, about
two-thirds of the workforce.
The president intensified the call on Thursday on a visit to the
construction site of a future Microsoft Corp data center near
Chicago. The construction firm, Clayco, said it plans to implement
immunization or testing requirements for all employees.
Biden highlighted other vaccination success stories, including a
move by Chicago-based United Airlines to set an October deadline for
all employees to be fully vaccinated, the first U.S. carrier to do
so.
Biden praised other airlines and businesses that followed suit,
including entertainment company Walt Disney Co, drugstore operator
Walgreens Boots Alliance and Microsoft.
Immunization requirements have broad public support, and Wall Street
economists agree higher vaccination rates will stoke economic growth
and add jobs, the Democratic president said.
Biden's workplace vaccine order spurred pushback from high profile
Republican governors and resistant Americans. Biden said he was
initially reluctant to order vaccinations.
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 "We have to beat this thing.
So, while I didn't race to do it right away,
that's why I've had to move toward requirements
(that) everyone get vaccinated, where I had the
authority to do that," he said.
Biden's mandate announcement in September came
at a breaking-point moment as his administration
struggled to control the pandemic, which has
killed more than 700,000 Americans, as a large
swath of the nation's population refused to
accept free vaccinations that have been
available for months.
A surge of hospitalizations and deaths caused by
the highly contagious Delta variant of the
coronavirus has threatened not just the country
but a president who ran on promises to get
control of the pandemic. Biden's approval
ratings have sagged since he said in July the
United States was "closer than ever to declaring
our independence from a deadly virus."
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) said that cases and
hospitalizations have edged down on average over
the last seven days, but cautioned that deaths -
a lagging indicator - are still at 1,400 per
day, primarily among the unvaccinated.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason; Additional reporting
by Jarrett Renshaw and Alexandra Alper; Writing
by Cynthia Osterman; Editing by Lincoln Feast
and Bill Berkrot)
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