The Biden COVID Vaccine mandate applies directly to businesses of 100 employees or more. What are the cost implications to companies of COVID vaccination or testing. The following is a brief thought experiment on some of those costs.
VACCINATION AS A CONDITION OF EMPLOYMENT.
If a person is hired or employed by a company of 100 workers, managers, administrators and others, the company can certainly demand that their employees get the COVID vaccine as a condition of employment. However, the company has now assumed the liability for employee COVID vaccine side effects which can include lost productivity, injury, disability and death. Unless the government indemnifies the company for such vaccine adverse events, the liability can run from thousands to millions of dollars – and potentially put the entire company’s survival at risk.
Annual cost of insurance to cover COVID liability will be difficult to anticipate because of the unknowns involved. Insurance companies must charge to cover their risks, and corporate COVID insurance costs could suddenly increase. It is even possible that COVID employment insurance will be difficult or impossible to obtain if there happens to be an unexpected number of COVID vaccination injuries, disabilities or deaths in the company.
TESTING AS A CONDITION OF EMPLOYMENT
If the average cost of a single test is $10, then the annual cost for 52 weekly tests is over $500. For 100 employees, this is $50K per year. But this does not include the cost of test monitoring or reporting the results to the government. (There is a direct cost to the company if they use a corporate employee or contractor to monitor 100 employee tests per week, keep records of each test, and fill out the required government reports.) This cost can be upwards of $100K to $200K per year, and if 100% compliance is not observed government fines are likely. And still there is the potential for someone to report COVID positive with all the liability and lost productivity implications.
One alternative is to require that each employee purchase their own COVID tests and report the results weekly to the company. (Who pays for the cost of the test items? Does the employee incur the cost or does the company reimburse the employee for the cost?) The individual COVID tests reports would then be collected by an assigned company employee or contractor and results sent to the government. This is the trust your employee method of COVID testing. Obviously, if someone reports a negative test but then suddenly tests COVID positive, the entire individual honesty process becomes suspect and who knows what liabilities would be incurred.
As I said at the beginning of this article, this is a thought experiment. I am sure that there are many other ideas regarding COVID corporate costs. My point is that there is a slippery slope here to be navigated and one that is fraught with many different perils. This, of course, is why corporate CEOs and CFOs go prematurely gray – or worse at an early age.