Fox News’ Anti-Vax Mandate Messaging Is Out of Step With Its Own Strict Policies

Over the past six months, Fox News personalities have used the network’s platform to liken vaccine mandates to apartheid, accused the Biden administration of using vaccine requirements to banish “sincere Christians in the ranks” of the military, and otherwise undermined the efficacy of vaccines nearly every day. But in a rare interview granted to The Hollywood Reporter, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, who acknowledged that she is vaccinated, refused to discuss the rhetoric of the network’s leading anti-vaccine voice. “I have a regular cadence of conversations with a wide variety of talent here, including our prime-time talent,” Scott said when asked about Tucker Carlson. “I will never discuss those conversations. That’s not who I am. I am loyal first. I am loyal to everyone on the team, whether they are someone on the news side or the opinion side. To me, they are all people who work for Fox News Media, and I respect the privacy of those conversations.”

On Wednesday night, Carlson’s mysterious personal relationship with the COVID-19 vaccine led MSNBC host Chris Hayes to call out the Fox News star. “The Fox News vaccine requirement is stricter than the one proposed by President Joe Biden and described as ‘tyranny’ and ‘creeping communism,’” Hayes said. (Indeed, 90% of Fox’s full-time employees were vaccinated as of last month, with daily testing for those who are not.) “If you truly believe you are suffering under the ‘sadomasochistic heel’ of a tyrannical employer,” Hayes said, “even if they are paying you lots and lots of money, if you don’t want people to think you’re a total fraud, then you have to have the guts to call out Fox News or resign in protest.”

While the network did somewhat bend on the issue over the summer, as a number of anchors promoted the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, Carlson never broke, and he continued his fight against the jab even if it meant actively undermining the pro-vaccine remarks made by his colleagues. Though, Carlson is not alone in that respect. Sean Hannity, Fox’s second-most popular host behind Carlson, had a brief stint in which he voiced support for vaccines and recommended that his viewers “take COVID seriously,” but his apparent change of heart was remarkably short-lived. Following those remarks in July, Hannity assured his fans that he was by no means “urging people to get the COVID-19 vaccine” but to “do the research.” And Hannity has only renewed his concerns about the country’s low vaccination rate in an effort to demonize the “unvaccinated” migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. “An unprecedented multimillion-person surge, all these unvaccinated illegal immigrants packed into Biden’s cages, Biden’s overcrowded cages, makeshift tents, no social distancing, and as I pointed out, not even any testing––never mind a vaccine,” Hannity said on Wednesday night while running an ad that depicted migrants as disease-ridden. “We will never know, by the way, how many Americans died because they were infected by the illegal immigrants that Joe Biden is processing through the country and dispersing all around the rest of the country.” 

That same night, Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who has previously accused “anti-freedom” Democratic lawmakers of forcing an “experimental drug on Americans against their will,” used the alarmingly high nationwide COVID death toll as a political cudgel against the Biden administration. “Why didn’t Biden step down today? According to Johns Hopkins, more people died of COVID in 2021 than all of 2020,” she said. “So despite being handed vaccines, promising therapeutics, Biden has presided over a year of death.”

On the matter of COVID deaths, the daughter of an unvaccinated man who died of COVID-19 last month partially pinned her father’s death on Carlson’s promotion of vaccine misinformation. “He watched some Tucker Carlson videos on YouTube,” said Katie Lane while discussing her father’s death on CNN. “And some of those videos involved some misinformation about vaccines. And I believe that that played a role.”

While it is difficult to quantify the effects caused by Fox’s anti-vaccine push, the progressive media watchdog group Media Matters released a report this week detailing just how committed the network apparently is to undermining vaccines. Fox News has aired segments denigrating COVID-19 vaccines or pro-vaccine policies on all but two days over the last six months, according to the report. “Fox pushed a claim undermining vaccines during 99% of the days [from April through September],” the report states, noting that it “deemed claims to be undermining vaccines if they described the vaccines as: unnecessary or dangerous; coercive, representing government overreach, or violating personal freedom or choice; or cynical ploys for political or financial gain.”

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