Senior minister Nadhim Zahawi has said that the UK does not need a Canadian-style vaccine mandate; but the British government has already made vaccination mandatory for care home workers and is considering the same measures for the more than one million staff in the NHS.
On Wednesday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the conditions of one of the world’s strictest vaccine mandates, stating that all federal employees and air, marine, and rail staff and travellers over 12 years old must be vaccinated from the end of this month. The United States has also imposed its own vaccine mandates for most federal employees from the end of next month.
Nadhim Zahawi, the former vaccine minister and recently-appointed education secretary, told talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer on Thursday that a similar mandate would not be imposed on British government workers or travellers.
Mr Zahawi said: “We’re in a very different place to countries that have much greater vaccine hesitancy… I think we don’t need to in the UK mandate vaccination because people have actually come forward in their millions and got vaccinated.”
However, the British government has already introduced mandatory vaccination for care home staff and is looking to impose the same mandate on NHS workers. Justifying the impending deadline for care home workers, Zahawi said that in such situations “like a care worker looking after a vulnerable person” or “the wider healthcare employees where again there is a duty of care, that’s a very different place to be”.
“I think it’s right [vaccine mandates] when there’s a duty of care to the most vulnerable,” he said.
The education secretary was more diplomatic in his defence of vaccine mandates than Health Secretary Sajid Javid, who said over the weekend that if care workers do not want to be vaccinated, they should “go and get another job”.
Mr Zahawi’s remarks may offer little assurance to Britons, as another minister had once vehemently rejected the introduction of vaccine passports, only for their implementation now to be included in the government’s emergency planning for Winter.
In late November 2020, Mr Zahawi had suggested that the government was already looking into vaccine passports, claims that were the next day strongly rejected by senior minister Michael Gove, who told Sky News’s Kay Burley: “No… No, that’s not being planned. I certainly am not planning to introduce any vaccine passports and I don’t know anyone else in Government [who is].”
However, Gove went on to oversee a review into the introduction of vaccine passports, then stating in July his support for some form of vaccine certification, actions starkly underlining what the words of a cabinet minister are worth.
Zahawi himself had also pledged to a member of the House of Lords that there would be no introduction of vaccine passports.
Sir Graham Brady, the most senior non-governmental Conservative MP, told Breitbart London of his concerns of the introduction of vaccine passports.
Speaking to the news outlet’s Kurt Zindulka at a Conservative Party conference fringe event against vaccine passports last weekend, Sir Graham said that there are “real and important concerns” over possible discrimination and privacy issues.
“But in some ways, my biggest concern is the way in which the big changes that have happened over the last 18 months, the shift in balance between the state and the citizen, the big erosion of people’s liberties that’s gone on, could be made into something that goes on for years, or, effectively, becomes permanent,” Mr Brady said.
“The simple lesson of history is that all governments, if they’re given power, they tend to want to keep it,” he said.
Watch the full interview with Sir Graham Brady below and read the article here.
Kurt Zindulka / Breitbart News
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