Karen Lynch joins Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit.


CVS Health CEO: COVID Vaccines will become an annual event

Well, I want to start by asking you kind of your big picture outlook on the pandemic Of the about 200 million vaccine doses that have been distributed in the us CVS has given out about 34 million you are on the front lines of the boosters, the pediatric shots. but also the ongoing reluctance and resistance for vaccination and pockets of the country. What are you seeing and how much longer is Vaccination and the vaccination campaign going to be such a big part of our life in our business? Well, you know, as you said, we vaccinated over 34 million Americans since we started this. And if you kind of roll back the clock, we started testing in shrewsbury Massachusetts in the rain way back when and we've been doing this um trying to get us to prevail against the pandemic. Since very early on vaccines are gonna be with us for a while. Um, as you know, there is unfortunately a a lot of misinformation out there, a high degree of hesitancy and that's what we're working through right now. We've been spending a lot of time, you know, getting out into the local markets and trying to communicate uh to people about the importance of ex, you know, vaccinations. I have a daughter in law that works in a hospital. So I get to kind of see it, you know, real life and what was interesting she shared with me their day, what's happening now is young moms are coming into the hospitals and um they're delivering their babies. And then the moms are losing their lives. And so they're not, the babies are never gonna meet their moms. And what we're seeing is a huge, huge increase in hospitalizations as a result of being unvaccinated. And so, um, you know, the boosters are out. So those are, you know, when you have six months um, from your second shot for Pfizer, you'll have the opportunity to get a booster. I would encourage all of us to um get those boosters. Moderna is currently in um, you know, ask for FDA approval. They will be out very shortly and then the pediatric vaccines will be out as soon as they get approval. Uh, Pfizer has asked for emergency use of their pediatric vaccine. And so it's going to be with a a while. And um, the other thing I would say is we're in the midst of doing flu shots. And this is gonna be an interesting um season because not only will, you know, we see the flu, well, we will see upticks in coronavirus and um, we're encouraging everyone to get their flu shots at the same time. So, I think it's with us for quite some time and it likely will become an annual event. I want to ask a little bit about how you are communicating with employees around vaccine expectations in august CVS set of vaccine mandate for some employees. Um, by the end of October 34, by the end of October I believe is when they're expected to be vaccinated. What are you seeing in terms of up to? Yeah. So we made uh and it's a really difficult decision. We had to make a decision. And um I made the decision to have a mandate for vaccines for all of our corporate employees and all of our clinicians. I firmly believe that when you were all getting vaccinated, you expected your pharmacists to be vaccinated and you know, are you know, we're in the homes of individuals who are infusion nurses. You know, we have our many clinic nurses. So we made that difficult decision uh to mandate. Now we're asking all of our employees to load up their vaccination records. They have until October 31. Um and and then we'll be addressing that situation. We're in the process of sending letters. So those individuals that haven't loaded up their vaccines and uh and and then we'll have to address the situation in october at the same time, we're doing a massive campaign for hiring so that we can backfill um for those individuals that choose not to get vaccinated. But we're healthcare company. And you know in the end game as a health care company, it was a decision I felt that was very important for us to make um so that we really led the way