United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said on Tuesday that just 232 out of the airline’s 67,000 employees, or 0.3 percent, have refused its vaccine mandate.
Kirby was asked on CBS Mornings why United instituted a vaccine mandate. It was announced in early August.
“So at United – the beginning of the crisis I made a commitment, I did,” said Kirby. “I wrote a letter to every family of everyone we lost to Covid.”
Kirby said he wrote “just sympathies, we miss them, and tried to make it a little bit personal.”
He continued:
But I had to know something about everyone that lost their life in order to write those letters. And that made it personal to me. And then you know, I stopped writing them in march of last year, as things started getting better.Then by July, with the Delta variant, the second time I got notified of an employee, a 57-year-old pilot, that had passed away. I walked around for half an hour and finally called our team and said like “this is enough is enough, we can do something about this.” We believe in safety. It’s the right thing to do. We know it’s the right thing to do. Knowing it will be difficult, know that not everyone will agree. But we’re doing it from a principle of doing the right thing for safety … Seven weeks later we got 99.7 percent of our employees vaccinated.
“Out of our
Watch above, via CBS.