Tech giant makes a sharp point on shots

Google on Tuesday began to enforce rules mandating COVID-19 vaccinations for its workers in the United States, a move that leaves the threat of dismissal hanging over holdouts and puts the technology giant in step with other big US companies acting to safeguard workplaces.

The company requires that all workers who visit Google premises must provide a negative COVID-19 test result and report their vaccination status, according to a company memo that was sent on Thursday to full-time employees.

"The Omicron variant has become the dominant strain in the US and is highly transmissible," Google's chief health officer Karen DeSalvo wrote in a memo obtained by the CNBC network.

There were 66,421,749 cases in the US as of early Tuesday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Around 64 percent of the US population is fully vaccinated, according to the John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

Google's vaccination policy was announced in December before a Supreme Court ruling on Thursday that blocked the administration of US President Joe Biden from enforcing a vaccine mandate for private companies with more than 100 employees. Biden said after the ruling that it is up to states and individual employers to determine whether they will require employees to get vaccinated.

"We're continuing to implement our vaccination policy requiring COVID-19 vaccinations or approved accommodations for any individuals accessing our sites," a Google spokesperson told China Daily in an email.

Citigroup, the fourth largest bank in the US, was the first major Wall Street bank to impose a strict vaccine mandate for US workers: Get a shot or face being fired by Jan 14.

Office workers who didn't comply by then would be placed on unpaid leave and fired at the end of the month unless they are granted an exemption, according to a company memo seen by Reuters and Bloomberg earlier this month.

Strict mandate

The bank, which employs 65,000 people in the US, announced its plan to impose new vaccination rules in October and has become the first major Wall Street institution to follow through with a strict vaccine mandate.

Other major Wall Street banks, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, have told some unvaccinated employees to work from home, but none has yet gone as far as firing staff.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase－the largest bank in the US with more than 260,000 employees globally－suggested during a recent interview that it may also terminate its unvaccinated workers.

US companies outside the finance sector have fired staff for not getting vaccinated.

While US President Joe Biden has vowed to keep businesses and schools open, some experts wonder if that's possible given the highly infectious nature of Omicron and the lack of adequate measures to combat it, The Guardian said in a recent report.

"The economy cannot stay open and schools cannot stay open when so many people are getting sick," said the report, quoting Margaret Thornton, an educational researcher at Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

"We must take action to slow the spread in order to keep schools running, to keep businesses running," said Thornton, lamenting much of that action has been slow to happen.

The Omicron variant comes on the heels of a devastating Delta wave in the fall and existing staff and supply shortages, with little opportunity to recover, the report said, citing the seven-day average of infections in the United States which was running at more than 750,000 cases, far higher than during Delta's peak.

Hospitals across the nation may already be more full than official numbers suggest, and schools have also struggled to remain in-person, the report said.

The criticisms also come as US citizens' approval of the pandemic response of the White House hit a new low, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll released on Sunday.

The poll, which surveyed 2,094 adult respondents in the country between Jan 12-14, found that just more than a third of the respondents believe US anti-pandemic efforts were "going well".

Xinhua and agencies contributed to this story.