16 May 2025 Does CVS Support Pushing Transgenderism on Children? It Won’t Say
Washington, D.C. — At yesterday’s annual shareholder meeting of CVS Health Corporation, CVS executives refused to answer two important questions pertaining to the company’s controversial positions and partnerships that risk both its reputation and bottom line.
Only 24 minutes into the meeting, after answering only two questions, CVS executives closed the meeting, saying time for questions had run out, and did not answer these two questions submitted by a representative of the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP):
1. CVS is a platinum partner of the Human Rights Campaign and has scored 100% on the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index, even though the Human Rights Campaign has been accused of pushing transgenderism on children and undermining women’s sports and spaces. In a letter submitted to the SEC, CVS claimed that its status as a Platinum Partner of HRC, as well as the policies that earned CVS a 100% score on HRC’s Corporate Equality Index, are “not controversial” but rather “mainstream and customary.” Does CVS stand by this characterization of its relationship with HRC?
2. CVS has been rated “High Risk” on the 1792 Exchange’s Corporate Bias Ratings, in part because “CVS embraces corporate initiatives that redirect its central focus from business goals to partisan policies and divisive issues.” Meanwhile, CVS has underperformed the S&P 500 by over 75% over the past 3 years. Has CVS’s board discussed the aforementioned ratings?
Stefan Padfield
“The SEC Staff recently issued a ‘no-action’ letter that can be read as concluding that CVS’s ordinary business includes ‘transing’ kids,” Free Enterprise Project Executive Director Stefan Padfield recently wrote in a commentary published at RealClearMarkets.
“CVS is a health care company, which raises the very disturbing specter that part of the reason it is supportive of transing kids (assuming you agree with that characterization) is so that it can benefit financially by, for example, providing the drugs associated with transitioning,” he wrote. “And while one might argue that’s actually in favor of concluding all this is simply ordinary business, the problem is you are unlikely to find any disclosure from CVS along the lines of: ‘We support transing children because it’s profitable for us.’ The absence of any such disclosure brings us right back to all the foregoing, raising a serious social policy issue that shareholders should be allowed to vote on.”
CVS, in its rules for the meeting, does claim it will answer some unanswered questions later. FEP is hoping for a response to its two pressing questions.
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