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Chris Alonzo’s Chester County mushroom farm has operated throughout the COVID-19 pandemic with the hope that a vaccine would find its way into workers’ arms sooner rather than later.
For the past year, Alonzo has followed the federal and state governments’ lead, encouraging his roughly 160 employees, most of them Latino immigrants, to commit to getting vaccinated.
Alonzo said many of the people who work for him at Pietro Industries in Kennett Square are “not very comfortable with the medical side of things in the United States.” They’re used to dealing with smaller clinics in their home countries and don’t know how to navigate the system in the U.S. So their overwhelming demand for the vaccine came as something of a surprise to Alonzo.