CNN said on Thursday that it had fired three employees who violated its coronavirus safety protocols by going to the office unvaccinated, one of the first known examples of a major American corporation’s terminating workers for ignoring a workplace vaccination mandate.

CNN had said this year that employees would need to be vaccinated against the virus in order to return to its American offices. The network has been relying on an honor system rather than requiring proof of vaccination status.

“In the past week, we have been made aware of three employees who were coming to the office unvaccinated. All three have been terminated,” CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker, wrote in an internal memo on Thursday that The New York Times obtained. “Let me be clear — we have a zero-tolerance policy on this.”

Mr. Zucker did not say where the employees worked, what positions they held or how their violations of the vaccine mandate were discovered. CNN declined to comment beyond his memo.

“We expect that in the weeks ahead, showing proof of vaccination may become a formal part” of the process for gaining access to the network’s workplaces, Mr. Zucker added.

Many large companies — including Facebook and Google — have said they will require employees to be vaccinated against the virus in order to return to the office. Some companies, including The Washington Post, have gone further by making vaccination a condition of further employment.

But few corporations have described exactly what kind of consequences would arise for employees who violated the vaccine requirements.

In his memo on Thursday, Mr. Zucker announced that CNN had postponed its formal Sept. 7 return to the office for American employees. CNN has not determined a new date, but Mr. Zucker said sometime in October “seems reasonable at this point.” He wrote that “a little more than a third” of CNN’s American newsroom employees were now regularly working in the office again.

  • TheCaconym [any]
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    edit-2
    3 years ago

    In France here (where you either have a vaccine certificate or a 48hr-old at most negative PCR test or you 1. will get fired from your job if you work in the public sector or in some other private people-facing jobs and 2. you can't get access to restaurants, bars, cinemas, medium to large events, and large supermarkets), "fake" vaccine cards have already started showing up.

    Except the QR Code is basically signed with the French government's private key, so faking them is not possible; instead we're seeing some nurses taking cash for pretending to vaccinate and then generate an official vaccine card for the antivax person with their usual computers. Two such groups have been detected and arrested in the last few days, for example (most of the time because their colleagues noticed something was amiss and reported them). From the news articles about it, a fake vaccine card apparently goes for between 30 EUR (~35 USD) and 400 EUR (~471 USD), with a more common price being around 150 EUR (~176 USD).

    • SerLava [he/him]
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      edit-2
      3 years ago

      In woke commanist Europe you can't even kill your own grand ma ma without government interference in the form of ill-egal con-fisca-tory tax-ation.

    • SoyViking [he/him]
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      3 years ago

      In Denmark we have a Covid Passport, an app telling if you've been vaccinated, have had covid and recovered or have a recent negative test. You need to show a valid Covid Passport when going to restaurants, museums and the like. The app has a QR code signed with a government key that you can scan and verify with the same app. The app works fairly well.

      And very few people are using it. Most places will not ask to see the app at all. Other places will just believe you if you say you have a Covid Passport and out of those who actually wants to see the app very few places actually scan and verify the QR code.

      • FloridaBoi [he/him]
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        3 years ago

        My friend showed me the app that contains all the COVID results and vaccinations. It would be amazing to actually have that in the US.

        • SoyViking [he/him]
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          3 years ago

          The app works very well. Lots of places can't be arsed to actually use it though.