Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, on Thursday’s broadcast of “CNN Newsroom,” touted the vaccine mandate for companies recently announced by President Joe Biden.
Raimondo pushed back against the notion that the mandate would hurt the food and hospitality industry recover from the shutdowns. She said it is actually “the single best thing that we can do” to immediately help those industries.
“I think that will make things much, much better,” Raimondo stated. “We were moving in a much better direction for restaurants, hotels, and then the Delta variant started to spike. And so the single best thing that we can do quickly, immediately, to help restaurants, help hotels, help hospitality, is for everybody to get vaccinated so that waiters and waitresses feel comfortable going back to work, people feel comfortable going out for dinner, business travel can pick up again, and business travelers can, you know, spend money in restaurants. That, I cannot emphasize enough. Everybody needs to get vaccinated. And businesses should really consider requiring their employees to get vaccinated.”
Raimondo went on to say that businesses should take a “very, very hard look” at requiring vaccines for customers.
“These vaccines work. We know they work. There is an antidote — it’s the vaccine. And the quicker we get people vaccinated, the better our economy will be,” she concluded.
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