President Biden on Wednesday called on every employer in America to give employees paid time off to get vaccinated, the administration’s latest move to try to persuade the more than half of the nation’s adults who have yet to get a dose to do so.
“No working American should lose a single dollar from their paycheck because they chose to fill their patriotic duty to get vaccinated,” Mr. Biden said.
White House officials also said the administration would offer a paid leave tax credit to offset the cost for companies with fewer than 500 employees.
The announcement came during a presidential address to mark what Mr. Biden called a major milestone: 200 million shots in the arms of the American people, with a week to go before the president’s 100th day in office. As of Wednesday, more than 199 million doses had been administered across the country beginning Jan. 20, according to data as reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It’s an incredible achievement for the nation,” Mr. Biden said, while also instructing Americans to continue wearing masks until everyone is vaccinated.
“We all need to mask up until the number of cases goes down, until everyone has a chance to get their shot,” he said.
But the distribution of those shots has been uneven: While New Hampshire has given at least one shot to 59 percent of its citizens (a percentage that includes children, most of whom are not yet eligible), Mississippi and Alabama are at 30 percent.
In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Wednesday that as of Friday, people 60 and older could get vaccinated at 16 state-run mass vaccination sites without an appointment.
A senior administration official, who previewed the announcement on the condition of anonymity, described the initiative to involve the private sector as the next big opportunity and said employers would be especially effective in reaching out to the large percentage of working Americans who are still unvaccinated.
About 30 percent of unvaccinated employees said they were more likely to get a shot with an incentive like a gift card or paid time off, multiple officials who previewed the announcement said.
The seven-day average of vaccinations has declined slightly in recent days, to 3.02 million a day as of Wednesday, from a high point of 3.38 million last week, according to a New York Times analysis of C.D.C. data.
While many big companies have researched vaccine mandates, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has told employers that they can require vaccination to protect public health, most have found that to be counterproductive and have chosen to incentivize the vaccine instead.
But with Republicans arguing that mandates amount to an intrusion on personal liberty, the White House is steering clear of the discussion, saying the decision to require vaccination or proof of it will be left to individual employers. And with the economy gearing up, managers are reluctant to demand inoculation, fearing too many employees would seek work elsewhere.
State health officials, business leaders, policymakers and politicians are struggling to figure out how to tailor their messages, and their tactics, to persuade not only the vaccine hesitant but also the indifferent. The work will be labor intensive, and much of it may fall on private employers, but the risk is clear: If it takes too long to reach “herd immunity,” the point at which the spread of the virus slows, worrisome new variants could emerge that evade the vaccine.
Mihir Zaveri contributed reporting.
