Now Fox News Will Require Daily Testing Of Unvaccinated Employees

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy has unearthed a memo distributed at Fox News from Kevin Lord, the company's head of human resources, announcing that while more than 90 percent of its full-time employees claim to have been vaccinated for COVID-19, the company was now set to institute daily testing for everyone else. (Four weeks ago, all Fox employees were required to upload their vaccination status into a human resources database.)

Keep in mind that this is the same network whose actual on-air content has undermined vaccination efforts, celebrated people who refuse to take the vaccines, and even encouraged the use of counterfeit vaccination cards. The network had also previously attacked President Joe Biden in July for instituting vaccine and testing requirements for the federal workforce, even though Fox News had already been doing something very similar with a vaccine passport system for its own offices.

"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," Lord wrote in the new memo. "Additional details about this protocol will be shared with the relevant employees in the near future."

Fox is actually going way beyond Biden's policies. The upcoming rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration only requires that unvaccinated employees at companies with more than 100 workers would have to test negative once a week, while Fox News is mandating daily testing inside its own walls.

And since late last week, in response to Biden's order for vaccine and testing requirements for large businesses throughout the private sector, the network's talking heads have gone positively ballistic. (At the same time, none of them have quit their jobs at Fox in protest of the network's internal practices.)

• Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway said on Thursday night that Biden's order for vaccine and testing requirements was "going to require everybody to stand up and resist and fight."
• Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Will Cain on Friday night compared proposals for vaccine requirements in order to board an airplane to "the right of Black Americans to enjoy interstate travel."
• Sean Hannity also declared on Friday night that "you better get the vaccine or Dr. Joe Biden is going to unleash the full force of the federal government against you and your loved ones and your employer. And you will be cancelled in society altogether. You will be shut out of everything."
• Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Rachel Campos Duffy said on Monday morning that vaccine and testing requirements are "the beginning of the communist-style social credit system," claiming that "this is the beginning of that system where if you're a dissident, if you don't agree with the party in power, you will be punished."
• And on Monday night, Fox prime-time host Tucker Carlson warned that vaccine requirements would lead to a dystopian future of surveillance and forced psychotropic medications for the conservative population. Then, he suggested that something must be done to stop all of this before his own hypothetical scenario comes true: "Without mass resistance, that is exactly what is coming and it's coming soon, and once it does come, the question is where does it go from there?"

Apparently, "where does it go from there" is a job at Fox News.