The government is believed to be announcing next week that vaccination against the Chinese coronavirus will be mandatory for the NHS’s more than one million staff members in England, according to reports.
Compulsory vaccination for elderly care home staff was already passed into law in June, with the deadline for full vaccination set for November 11th. With just one week ago, a report claimed that one in ten care home staff are not fully vaccinated — some 63,000 people — with around 13,000 employees having already left the care sector.
Boris Johnson’s Conservative government opened a consultation in September on enforcing the same rules on the around 1.45 million staff and while spokesmen have said the decision has not yet been finalised, insiders speaking to major British media, including The Telegraph, claim that the measures will be introduced by March 31st.
The Tory Party-backing newspaper said sources told them that while the consultation only closed last week, Health Secretary Sajid Javid was “leaning towards” compulsory vaccination.
The government is believed to be making the official announcement shortly, according to The Guardian, with a source telling the liberal-left newspaper that the plans would be delayed until the Spring to stop a Winter exodus of unvaccinated staff.
“Given the NHS is a horror show just now, with unprecedented pressure all over the place, to chuck an additional spanner in the works by making Covid jabs mandatory now would be foolhardy, and Sajid Javid isn’t a foolhardy politician,” a senior NHS source told The Guardian.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman denied the reports that a decision had been made, telling The Telegraph: “We have taken action to introduce vaccination requirements in care homes and we recently consulted on extending this further across health and other social care services. No final decisions have been made, and we will set out our response in due course.”
There is already a high uptake of vaccination amongst National Health Service staff in England, with the latest statistics showing that 90 per cent of workers have been fully vaccinated. However, in some hospital trusts across the country, that figure is as low as 78 per cent.
If the measures are brought in, Health Secretary Javid is unlikely to go soft on the medical staff who refuse the jab, having already told care home staff that if they didn’t want to be vaccinated, they should get another job.
“If you want to work in a care home, you are working with some of the most vulnerable people in our country. If you can’t be bothered to go and get vaccinated, then get out and go and get another job,” Mr Javid said in early October.