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March 1, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Mobileye, an Israeli self-driving car developer and subsidiary of Intel, will ban employees who reject a coronavirus vaccination from working on-site, CEO Amnon Shashua said.
In an internal letter leaked to the Israeli press, Shashua revealed that Mobileye expects about 10 percent of workers to refuse the COVID-19 vaccine, the Jerusalem Post reported Wednesday.
The company will bar those employees from in-person work, although some deemed necessary may be allowed to return if they present negative COVID-19 test results, the letter said. The testing requirement would apply to workers who already had the virus.
“Proud that 90% of @Mobileye employees are fully or partly vaccinated already. We will ‘go green’ first week of April with only vaccinated employees coming in to the office & others continuing (work from home),” Shashua tweeted last week.
Mobileye, which employs about 1,500 workers in Jerusalem, is the first major Israeli company to announce a vaccine mandate, according to the Post. While there is no law in Israel that allows employers to require COVID-19 vaccination, top officials reportedly have been looking at new legislation to change that.
“We are checking legislation that will prevent people who are not vaccinated or who have not been tested in the previous 48 hours from working with the public — for example, to stand before a class full of students,” Israeli Health Minister Yuli Edelstein said in February.
“It is possible that teachers who refuse to be vaccinated will need to pay from their own pocket for private tests every 48 hours,” he added. “I am not going to fire anyone, but if someone is not vaccinated, then that is their problem.”
Israel has deployed notably harsh COVID-19 measures, including multiple nationwide lockdowns and bans on international travel. Just last week, the country enacted a law allowing the government to share personal information of COVID-19 vaccine refusers and restricted economic reopening to those with a vaccination “green pass.”
Various health experts have denounced attempts to coerce employees to receive potentially deadly, side-effect-prone COVID-19 vaccines, many of which have been tested or manufactured with cells of aborted babies.
“Experimental vaccinations must always be an informed decision between a doctor and his or her patient that takes into consideration a plurality of risk factors, including patient age, comorbidities, and exposure risks,” America’s Frontline Doctors founder Dr. Simone Gold said in a press release in December.
“Vaccination mandates at the state, local, and private level are incompatible with civil liberties and subject millions of Americans to an experimental drug,” she emphasized.
U.S. businesses are generally permitted to require vaccinations, leading to multiple recent firings, although some state lawmakers have attempted to restrict their ability to do so.
Only around 56 percent of working adults in the United States are willing to get the vaccine, and even lower figures have been reported in other countries, polling shows. Racial minorities consistently have been found to be particularly reluctant to take the COVID-19 jab, raising additional concerns about the legality of vaccine mandates.