‘No More Pussyfooting Around’: Food Writer Corby Kummer Cheers Starbucks’ Latest Employee Vaccination Effort

On Tuesday’s Boston Public Radio, food writer Corby Kummer said he’s hoping more companies follow in the heels of coffee behemoth Starbucks, which is now requiring proof-of-vaccination for its hundreds of thousands of U.S. employees. Workers who opt out of vaccines will have to submit weekly tests, conducted at the employee’s expense. 

“This is an example of a big company saying ‘we’ve had it, we just have to get vaccinated, this is the wave of the future – no more pussyfooting around,’ and I think it’s great,” Kummer told hosts Jim Braude and Margery Eagan. 

He did, however, raise concerns that public perception of Starbucks as a “liberal” corporation might dissuade business leaders on the conservative side of the political spectrum to shirk responsibility for getting employees vaccinated against COVID-19. 

“I think that we all wish that it wasn’t a seeming political litmus test,” he lamented. “‘Oh, Starbucks must be Democratic, they must be liberal!’”

Kummer went on to list Tyson Foods as an instance of a corporation with a perceived conservative bent taking steps to protect workers from infection.

“If there were more and more right wing-perceived companies mandating this, it would really help,” he said.

“But Starbucks is big [and] publicly influential, and I hope this will have the effect of causing many others to impose mandates.”

Kummer is the executive director of the Food and Society policy program at the Aspen Institute, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a senior lecturer at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.