Reports suggest that Sajid Javid, who recently expressed hesitancy about “taking away people’s freedom” with vaccine passports, is keen to force all frontline NHS staff to get vaccinated against Covid. A decision on whether NHS staff, like care home workers, should be told to “get jabbed or get another job” is expected to be made later this month. i news has the story.
A formal consultation on making Covid and flu vaccination a condition of employment in the NHS is due to end on October 22nd, and the Health Secretary is ready to act swiftly to implement the change, i has been told.
Following a change in the law enacted this summer, staff in care homes have until November 11th to get double jabbed for Covid, after which point they will be legally barred from work without vaccination.
The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) has separate but similar plans to require all NHS frontline staff to be fully vaccinated – unless they have a medical exemption.
Javid is privately furious with the risk that unjabbed NHS staff pose to vulnerable patients when working in both hospital and in community settings. [Privatley? He seems to be fairly open about this.] …
He is understood to want to be “even more hardline” with health service staff than with care home staff, not least as they are directly employed by the state rather than by private providers.
While no one in Government wants to publicly pre-empt the consultation, it is understood that Boris Johnson is fully behind Javid’s belief that unjabbed health staff pose a risk to the most vulnerable
Javid also wants to offer extra reassurance to vulnerable patients that they can enter hospital and be sure that all those around them are double jabbed.
There is also a concern in government that unjabbed care home staff, who are barred from working with patients from next month, have been moving into the NHS.
The vast majority of NHS staff have been double jabbed. Latest weekly figures for England show 1,326,000 have had a first jab (92%), 1,277,000 (89%) have had a second jab. But 8% have not had any jab at all.
Worth reading in full.
