IBM has told its US employees that they will have to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by Dec. 8, citing President Joe Biden’s vaccine requirements for government contractors.
“As we’ve said throughout the pandemic,” the company told us, “IBM’s health and safety practices are driven by science. Given the continued spread of COVID-19, the local clinical conditions around IBM sites, and the reality that vaccines are readily available nationwide, we will now require all IBM US employees to be fully vaccinated by December 8.”
IBM told us it “will consider select medical and religious exemptions” to this policy if employees submit the relevant requests by Nov. 8; otherwise the company said the mandate “applies to IBM US employees regardless of where they work and how often they come into an IBM office.” Employees who miss the Dec. 8 deadline will be “put on an unpaid leave of absence” on Dec. 9.
Those unvaccinated employees won’t be fired outright, however, and IBM said that employees who are on unpaid leave as of Dec. 15 will still receive their 401k matching. It’s not clear how long employees will be allowed to stay on unpaid leave, but presumably many of them would have to comply with the vaccine policy or find a job somewhere else before too long.
President Biden issued a mandate in September that required people who work in the executive branch as well as federal contractors to be fully vaccinated. (It also required large companies to either introduce vaccine requirements or commit to weekly COVID-19 testing.) He also pushed for more companies to mandate COVID-19 vaccines on the same day IBM revealed its policy.
“As a federal contractor, it is a business imperative for IBM to comply with this mandate,” IBM said in a copy of an internal memo obtained by CNBC.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines state that people are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after their final shot, so the latest IBM employees can receive the vaccine is Nov. 24. That’s assuming they get a single-shot vaccine; anyone getting the two-shot Moderna or Pfizer vaccine will have to receive the first dose by Oct. 27 to meet the deadline. More information about the timing of each type of vaccine is available on the CDC website.
