Piggy Bank

By Amador Zuazua JGSM '10

By:

Posted: 12/1/09

This opinion editorial was chosen as one of the top two submissions in the NBA 5670 Management Writing course as part of Cornell Business Journal's collaboration with Prof. Charlotte Rosen.

A banker's life is worth more than that of others. While you and I might not think so, that is exactly what people feel the government believes after BusinessWeek.com published a story about H1N1 (swine) flu vaccinations on November 2nd, a story subsequently picked up by The Today Show. In their story, BusinessWeek talked about how large employers in New York City such as Goldman Sachs, CitiGroup, and the Federal Reserve administered H1N1 flu shots while many at-risk Americans were still waiting for them.

The story went on to state the number of doses that some of these employers had given: Citigroup employees had received 1,200 while Goldman Sachs employees had received 200. Problems arose not when BusinessWeek first ran the story, but when The Today Show picked up the story and created a media frenzy. See, other media outlets went on to publish how many doses some of the hospitals in the city received, and that infuriated politicians, lobbyists and the public: Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center was shipped 200, Mount Sinai Medical Center received 1,700 and Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers got 1,900.

At the time of publishing, BusinessWeek.com had not received comment from CitiGroup, and a spokesman for Goldman Sachs did not know how the doses would be distributed. However, the initial article did not mention that those employers receiving the flu shots were required by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) to distribute them to their at-risk employees, just like hospitals and education institutions.

The city of New York received 800,000 doses of vaccine for H1N1 influenza as of the beginning of November. The biggest portion of these doses, 39%, was set aside for schools, while 21% was allocated for health care providers, 19% for hospitals, and 6% for private adult providers, including large employers with on-site medical personnel and clinics such as Goldman Sachs and CitiGroup. Cornell University received an initial supply of 1,600 doses for its student population of 19,800, which is comparable to the 1,200 doses received by CitiGroup for its 20,000 employees in the New York City area.

I believe that much of this outrage is coming from the public's negative overall perception of financial institutions in the current recession. The public blames the latest economic downturn on some of these institutions, and adding to that the TARP money that was distributed to some of them, anything that portrays these companies as receiving an advantage over the general public will be viewed very negatively, even if this is not the case. While the negative public perception of some of these institutions might be fair, they are still required to follow the guidelines from the CDC when distributing the doses. In conclusion, I urge the media outlets covering this story, including The Today Show, to do their research thoroughly and include it as part of their story. After all, these financial institutions are already negatively perceived by the public, and negatively biased stories will not help them or our overall economy at all.