Tesla, Walmart work government connections for vaccination plans

U.S. companies have been quietly toiling behind the scenes to get vaccines for their employees as soon as possible, offering to help government officials distribute the shot as a way to enhance the economic recovery that they depend on.

For Tesla, the goal was to get a message from a board member to California’s state epidemiologist, via Elon Musk’s chief of staff. In Walmart’s home state of Arkansas, an executive sought to avoid having to traipse workers across town to get vaccinated at other pharmacies.

Overtures like these, gleaned from messages to state and local health officials logged in public records, show how large companies are probing the enigmatic new bureaucracies that control access to vaccines for their vast workforces. Getting shots in arms is a critical step for an eventual revival of the U.S. economy, where Walmart alone employs nearly 1.5 million people.

For companies big or small, in state after state, the questions are the same: How can we help? When can our workers get shots? Can it be done at our store, our factory? With two vaccines now available, answers are slowly taking shape. But clarity on the quantity and timing of vaccine supplies — and when those doses will be available to broader swaths of the American workforce — is critical information that remains hard to get.

“Those are the necessary inputs for us to work with an employer to then plan exactly how we would marshal resources and distribute and deploy those vaccines,” said Jeff Wells, chief executive officer of Marathon Health, an employer health-care provider. “We’re sort of right now at the transition point where I believe that most states are starting to shift to answer” those questions.