Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claims that Apple is encouraging employees to get COVID-19 vaccination shots by giving them paid time off for appointments and to recover if any side effects are experienced. Previously, the company offer paid time off to COVID-19 positive employees.
Since, the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, most of Apple’s employees have been working from home. However, the retail stores’ staff returned to work after the restrictions relaxed and provided them with custom-designed masks. At the company’s town hall meeting last year, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook shared that the company is planning for the return of corporate offices’ staff in June 2021.
Apple encourages employees to get COVID-19 vaccination
People familiar with the matter told Gurman that since the Cupertino tech giant does not have access to the vaccines, it is asking the employees to get COVID-19 shots at vaccination health centers. Gradually, states across the U.S are administering vaccinations to different age groups and California is starting the vaccination drive as well.
In California, where Apple has its main offices and more than 50 stores, people over the age of 16 will be eligible for vaccination on April 15, the state said last week. Many other states are also expanding vaccine eligibility.
In its recent report on global hiring figures, the Cupertino tech giant states that it has 160,000 employees worldwide. Therefore, its COVID-19 paid time off policy applies to all. Having said that, since the supply chain is an integral part of Apple’s operations, the vaccination policy of the company’s manufacturing partners for their workers is not known.
The tech giant has actively taken part in providing users access to verified COVID-19 related information by updating Apple Maps to show COVID-19 testing and vaccination centers in the United States, it built at-home screen tools and developed COVID-19 contact tracing APIs in partnership with Google. The company also gave a $10 million fund to COPAN to manufacture 15 million sample collection kits.
