As the CEO of a 2,000-plus person Maryland-based company involved in the COVID-19 response, I have a high tolerance for the obligations that come with it — like spending endless hours trying to explain complicated manufacturing processes to reporters who just learned we existed. Or battling back the misinformation that is used to find fault with the people who are the spine of our nation’s world-leading response to this pandemic.
But it pains me to watch how this negative attention affects our workforce. We talk about front line health care workers a lot, as we should. They are extraordinary, and we could not have done this without them this past year. But so are the men and women who sacrificed their personal lives to spend the past year developing and manufacturing the vaccines that will bring this terrible chapter to a close. That includes our Baltimore-area workforce at Emergent, to whom I will be forever indebted.
Emergent has been in the news a lot lately, and that’s frankly not something we’re used to. Until a year ago we were a little-known company that does our work behind the scenes. COVID-19 changed all that overnight. We help our nation prepare and respond to global calamities, like the opioid epidemic or a biological attack or fighting COVID-19.
For the first few months, it was welcome because our employees were getting recognition I thought was warranted given our company’s impressive track record. But people in our country, or at least some in our media, tend to put a target on the backs of people doing good. So, the attention grew confrontational