Unlike other meatpacking giants, Tyson announced a coronavirus vaccine mandate in fall 2021. In addition to buying protective equipment and cleaning supplies, Kelmer wrote, the company spent $86 million on testing. Kelmer wrote that Tyson executives created a coronavirus task force in January 2020, performed mass testing at plants in April and May of that year and shared the test results with public health agencies. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis that that journalists and politicians punished Tyson for being more transparent than some of its competitors. But Robert Kelmer, an attorney for Tyson, wrote in an April 2021 letter to the U.S.
Tyson spokesperson Liz Croston declined to comment. More: Biden unveils $1 billion plan to increase meatpacking competition, lower consumer prices required (Jones, Rivera and Samudio) to work in an environment rife with Corona Virus (sic) when they know or should have known that Tyson wasn't implementing the necessary safety precautions," Mary and Willis Hamilton, the attorneys on the case, wrote in almost identical petitions. The families also say Tyson managers did an insufficient job of testing employees for infections and cleaning the factories. They allege the company failed to take prompt action to space employees apart along its tightly packed pork processing lines, erect barriers between the workers, slow down the speeds of the lines and provide masks and other protective gear. The new cases accuse Tyson of gross negligence that resulted in the deaths of Ken Jones, Victor Barahona Rivera and Juan Jauregui Samudio, all of whom were employees at Tyson plants in Storm Lake. Tyson filed the petition in response to a June 2020 lawsuit filed by the families of three workers at the company's Waterloo plant who died of COVID-19: Sedika Buljic, Reberiano Leno Garcia and Jose Luis Ayala Jr. In their petition, according to Bloomberg, Tyson's lawyers wrote that the company followed "the federal government's instructions to help avert an impending national food shortage." They added that Tyson executives "will not be so eager to willingly aid the federal government in a crisis" if the company is subject to lawsuits. Trump's order instructed the secretary of agriculture to take "all appropriate action" to keep the country's meat and chicken processing plants open as COVID-19 spread, though it did not prohibit them from temporarily closing their plants. Tyson's attorneys filed the petition Friday, asking the country's highest court to hear their case and rule that a March 2020 executive order by then-President Donald Trump shielded the company from legal liability, Bloomberg Law reported. As three more families sue Tyson Foods over COVID-19 deaths among workers at its Iowa plants, the meatpacking giant is petitioning the U.S.