Wall Street Cos Push to Speed Up Covid-19 Vaccine Rollout

By Ilana Siyance

Big corporations, with their eye on recovery, are troubled by the slow Covid-19 rollout in New York and want to help.

In a desperate effort to pull NY’s economy into a recovery, large Wall Street companies are offering to help speed up the vaccination process. On Thursday, representatives from a few dozen large city-based firms held a call with Larry Schwartz, who was appointed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to head the Covid-19 vaccine rollout. As reported by the NY Post, they urged Albany to allow the city’s powerful private businesses to leverage their money and power to help get the city vaccinated.

New York City has yet to open any large vaccination sites and every part of the rollout seems to be troubled and blocked by impediments. Led by Goldman Sachs chief David Solomon, the group of business leaders demanded a plan to get people vaccinated and back in their Manhattan offices, so as to stave off irreparable economic damage.

“I urge political leaders at all levels and across all jurisdictions to do everything possible to implement a coordinated and comprehensive [vaccination] distribution plan,” Solomon said on a Monday earnings call. “In its absence, economic recovery will be unnecessarily delayed.”

For weeks, Mayor Bill de Blasio has been warning that the city is running out of vaccines and may need to delay or cancel appointments for frontline workers and senior citizens. On Friday, Gov. Cuomo tweeted that the state’s vaccine supply “may already be exhausted.” On Thursday’s 45-minute conference call, arranged by Partnership for NYC President Kathryn Wylde, the business leaders offered to try to use their clout to push the Biden administration in the White House to allocate more doses of the potentially life-saving vaccine to the country’s largest city. Other notable company heads involved in the call included the chief medical officer of BlackRock, which now holds a heavy sway in the White House, as well as medical personnel from JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Blackstone and Morgan Stanley. Many of the biggies offered their lobbying influence as well as their space and logistics to get New Yorkers inoculated and to get the economy moving again.

“The business community is very concerned of the consequences of not getting the vaccine out, because it is critical to economic recovery and bringing people into the offices,” said Wylde. “They know how much state and local governments are dealing with, and they are just saying they have logistics expertise, medical facilities and personnel that can help accelerate distribution”.