Facebook mandates Covid boosters

Vaccinated staffers at Facebook’s parent company will not be allowed to return to office unless they get a booster shot

Employees at Meta will have to show proof that they received a Covid-19 vaccine booster, with the company citing its effectiveness. Meta is now set to reopen its offices in March.

Meta – which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and virtual reality company Oculus – will fully reopen its offices on March 28. However, only fully vaccinated and boosted employees will be able to enter.

A spokesperson for the company said that “given the evidence of booster effectiveness, we are expanding our vaccination requirement to include boosters.”

Meta previously enforced a mandate which requires all in-person employees to have received two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine.

Facebook follows into the footsteps of other US companies that already mandated boosters. While the The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not changed the definition of “fully vaccinated”, it encouraged Americans to stay “up to date” with regards to the protection against the virus last week. However, the Pentagon signalled last month that it may still make booster vaccines mandatory for soldiers.

There has been an ongoing debate over the need to make Covid-19 booster shots a must for all. Several high-profile US politicians, all vaccinated and boosted, have recently tested positive for the coronavirus, further fuelling this debate while seemingly giving arguments to the opponents of vaccination mandates. Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin was one of the latest US politicians to test positive this month after being boosted in October. He argued, however, that he would have fared far worse against the disease if he had not been double-jabbed and boosted.

New York Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – who also received her booster in the Fall – tested positive for Covid-19 on Sunday and is reportedly recovering from the virus and its symptoms at home.