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.
Vaccine mandates work and historically have been one of the only ways to drag a certain amount of conservatives over the line. This should really be pushed by the federal government and not private companies, but I'll take it.
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).
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.
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.
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.
The app works very well. Lots of places can't be arsed to actually use it though.
Right now the barrier to entry is going to a paper supply store and getting some card stock
If Biden's administration cared, they'd have started a vaccine ID program as soon as he was elected, before the vaccines were offered. They don't care.
There should some QR Code on these cards to verify with the database.
The downside then is that people could bribe someone to fake a full record, and as a result skew vaccination rates, which will make future outbreaks of covid less predictable than they already are.
Seems easier to just get the vaccine in this scenario. The extra hurdles put it out of reach for most and would push the general population into the herd immunity range.
There are immunization records, and you can consent to an organization looking at them, and employment can be contingent upon allowing them to see it.
The vaccine passport should be for stores, since it's not practical for them to wade through bureaucracy to allow people in.
Text of the Wall Street Journal article on this which is better written:
CNN President Jeff Zucker told staff Thursday that the network fired three employees who came to work without getting a Covid-19 vaccine, as the company steps up efforts to keep the virus from spreading in its offices.
In an email to employees Thursday, Mr. Zucker said that the terminated employees violated the company’s honor system, which asked workers to attest that they were vaccinated but didn’t require them to produce documentary evidence of their vaccination.
“Let me be clear—we have a zero-tolerance policy on this,” Mr. Zucker said. “You need to be vaccinated to come to the office. And you need to be vaccinated to work in the field, with other employees, regardless of whether you enter an office or not.”
He said showing proof of vaccination may become part of the process of entering CNN buildings.
CNN had no immediate comment on Mr. Zucker’s email.
Up to now, workers have been coming into CNN offices on a voluntary basis. The company was targeting Sept. 7 as its official return-to-office date, but Mr. Zucker said the return will now be postponed. He said that, given expert guidance on the spread of the virus, the company is tentatively planning for a return to the office sometime in mid-October, but cautioned that plans could change.
“Given the uncertainty that exists today, we are reluctant to put a specific date on it,” Mr. Zucker said. “We will evaluate in the coming weeks, and I promise that we will give you at least 30 days notice for any return.”
“I think it is fair to say that we are all feeling a mix of anticipation, anxiety, frustration, confusion, and exasperation,” Mr. Zucker said. “But we will get there. Continue to take care of yourselves and each other.”
Zucker said sometime in October “seems reasonable at this point.”
Strange to me that they don't seem to think that the current situation means that people aren't gonna be returning to offices much at all this winter cause this is obviously far from figured out.
Incredible to me that people are looking around and proclaiming "yeah, we should be good by X date to return to normal". Like what are you basing this proclamation off of, my dude? By October we could have a new variant or some shit and it wouldn't surprise me in the least. There is no end in sight for coronavirus being a part of everyone's daily lives.
CNN fires
2400-acre wildfire engulfs Atlanta studios after CNN contributor drops a hot take.
