As Fox News incessantly rails against President Joe Biden’s new vaccine and testing requirements as “tyranny” and “authoritarianism,” the network’s parent company on Tuesday boasted of its own internal policies similar to those exact policies.
In a memo obtained by CNN reporter Oliver Darcy, Fox Corp. human resources chief Kevin Lord bragged that the vast majority of the company’s workforce is now vaccinated after calling upon staffers to input their vaccination status into a company-wide database.
“Following our request for employees to upload their vaccination status in our secure system, we are pleased to share that more than 90% of our full-time employees reported that they are fully vaccinated,” Lord wrote in the memo. “This is important for our company to know as we continue to implement our phased return to office timing and procedures.”
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Besides boasting of the media giant’s own version of a vaccine passport—the very system the Biden administration has touted in an appeal to vaccine-hesitant conservatives—Lord also announced that Fox Corp. would soon enact an even more aggressive policy than the one President Joe Biden is requiring for private-sector employers.
“Soon we will introduce another important health and safety measure for access to our facilities—daily COVID testing for the small group of employees who are not vaccinated or have not provided their vaccination status,” he wrote (Biden’s proposed rules require weekly testing). “Additional details about this protocol will be shared with the relevant employees in the near future.”
Last week, Biden announced that all federal employees and contractors will need to be vaccinated within 75 days. Additionally, the president asked the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to draft a new rule requiring businesses with more than 100 employees to require staffers to either be fully vaccinated or produce weekly negative COVID-19 tests.
While its employer is strictly adhering to the president’s vaccine policy, Fox News personalities have been screeching on-air that Biden’s plan to boost vaccinations—amid a deadly surge in the Delta variant—is nothing short of tyranny.
“BIDEN IS AN AUTHORITARIAN,” one chyron blared on Fox News last week, while another later than night raged that “BIDEN DECLARES WAR ON MILLIONS OF AMERICANS.”
“They created COVID hesitancy, they did this. They will say conservatives did this. No, you did this,” Sean Hannity exclaimed on Thursday evening. (The Fox News primetime star bragged in February 2020 that the coronavirus hadn’t yet killed any Americans.)
Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy and contributor Katie Pavlich, meanwhile, have urged viewers to “fight back” against the requirements that mirror their own employer’s, wondering aloud when people will say “enough is enough.”
And later Thursday night, Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway likened Biden’s new rules to “fascism,” adding that it would “require everybody to stand up and resist and fight.”
The following evening, Campos-Duffy, who has also compared vaccine mandates to apartheid, again blasted the vaccine policy as taking “authoritarianism to a whole new level by forcing vaccines on millions of Americans.” Separately, warned Hannity, “you will be canceled” and the government will target “your loved ones” if you don’t get vaccinated.
Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, as the network’s most prominent vaccine skeptic and loudest critic of COVID-19 guidelines, has defended the practice of obtaining fake vaccine cards, essentially telling his millions of viewers it’s OK to fraudulently claim to be vaccinated.
