The vast majority of employees of Fox Corporation, the umbrella company of the conservative Fox News channel, are vaccinated against coronavirus and those who are not will have to take daily tests, according to a note sent by the bosses, despite some of their stars screen questioning the vaccine.
A daily test is stricter than the firm mandate of the Biden administration that companies with more than 100 employees must require vaccines or weekly tests.
The news came when Joe Biden was scheduled to meet with business leaders on Wednesday, including Disney and Microsoft, to urge vaccination warrants for employees of U.S. companies.
These terms, which have earned the president both praise and strangers since he announced them last week, are expected to cover 80 million large corporate workers along with 17 million health professionals across the country.
In the note, which was sent Tuesday to Fox Corporation employees, Kevin Lord, the company’s executive vice president, announced that more than 90% of the company’s full-time employees had been vaccinated, CNN first. reported on Tuesday night.
The information was posted on a secure system where employees could share their vaccination status, the note said.
“Employees who are not vaccinated or have not provided their vaccination status and wish to access one of our facilities will not incur the cost of testing,” a Fox Corporation representative told The Guardian on Wednesday.
The note did not clarify when daily testing would begin for unvaccinated employees or those who refuse to disclose their status, and a company representative did not respond to any follow-up inquiries on the matter.
It remains to be seen how it will affect the environment within the organization that hosts prominent vaccine skeptics such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. The company did not respond to any specific queries about this inconsistency in its messages.
CNN also reported that the White House had praised Fox and challenged it to reflect its corporate practices to its viewers.
“Today’s Fox News news follows a trend we’re seeing across the country: vaccination and testing requirements work,” a White House spokesman told CNN Tuesday night, adding: “We are pleased that they have stepped up to protect their workforce and strengthen the economy and we encourage them to convey to their audience that such practices will protect their employees, their communities and the economy.”
The update on Fox Corporation employees coincided with the release of a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation that estimated the cost of preventable hospitalizations for unvaccinated adults to exceed $ 0.6 billion in June. to $ 3.7 billion in August, with a total of $ 5 billion spent in those three months alone.
During that time, the number of unvaccinated adults who were hospitalized primarily for Covid-19 treatment rose from 39,000 to 342,000, according to the report.
On Tuesday, the United States had recorded 663,913 deaths since the start of the pandemic, and one in 500 Americans died from the virus, according to CNN.