Biden presses employers to provide paid time off for vaccine shots, recovery

President Joe Biden on Wednesday sought to jump-start suddenly slowing vaccinations of Americans against covid-19, pressing businesses and nonprofits to give employees paid time off for the shots and touting government funding to underwrite some of the costs of that time.

The initiative, designed to encourage millions of unvaccinated people to get immunized, sends one of the strongest signals yet that vaccine demand is emerging as a bigger challenge than supply. It marks a shift from months of long waiting lists and limited opportunities for Americans to get vaccinated. Biden announced Wednesday that the United States will hit 200 million vaccination shots by Thursday, a target he had set out to meet by the end of April.

“I’m calling on every employer large and small in every state to give employees the time off they need, with pay, to get vaccinated,” Biden said. “No working American should lose a single dollar from their paycheck because they chose to fulfill their patriotic duty of getting vaccinated.”

Repeatedly declaring the country had entered a “new phase” in which all Americans ages 16 and older can get vaccinated, Biden warned that “the broad swath of American adults still remain largely unvaccinated,” and lamented that “too many younger Americans may still think they don’t need to get vaccinated.”

“To put it simply, if you’re waiting for your turn, wait no longer,” he said.