ESPN reporter Allison Williams quit her job rather than get vaccinated: NPR

ESPN reporter Allison Williams reports from a college basketball tournament at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on March 8, 2017. Williams said in an Instagram video that she is leaving ESPN because of the company’s vaccine mandate.

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ESPN reporter Allison Williams reports from a college basketball tournament at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on March 8, 2017. Williams said in an Instagram video that she is leaving ESPN because of the company’s vaccine mandate.

Lance King / Getty Images

ESPN college basketball and football reporter Allison Williams has joined a small minority of workers who have resigned or been fired from their jobs due to a vaccination mandate.

“I have been denied my request for accommodation by ESPN and The Walt Disney Company, and with effect next week I will be separated from the company,” she said in a video posted to Instagram on Friday.

ESPN’s parent company Disney had announced a vaccination mandate over the summer with a deadline Friday, October 22nd.

In early September, Williams had shared on Twitter that she had decided not to get a COVID-19 vaccine while she and her husband were trying to have another child.

“It is not in my interest to take the vaccine at this time,” she wrote.

The CDC has urged people who are pregnant or may become pregnant to be vaccinated, saying there is currently no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines cause fertility problems or data indicating an increased risk of miscarriage among humans. , who received an mRNA vaccine during pregnancy.

In the Instagram video, Williams talked about her medical concerns about receiving the vaccine, adding: “I am also so morally and ethically inconsistent with this.”

“Ultimately, I can not put a paycheck over the principle, and I will not sacrifice anything that I believe and have so strongly to sustain a career,” she said in the video. “I want to pray that things get better and that I can see you on television in some capacity in a stadium that will soon cover some games.”

Williams, who had reported to ESPN since 2011, acknowledged she’s not the only one walking away from a career or profession they love.

Hundreds of hospital workers have been laid off rather than vaccinated, but they generally represent only a small fraction of staff. For example, Duke Health in North Carolina reported that it had only fired 20 people out of a workforce of 23,000.

Meanwhile, United Airlines said it was terminating a few hundred of its 67,000 employees who did not comply with the airline’s vaccination mandate. Other employers who have imposed vaccine mandates also report that compliance rates are at 90%.