How Vaccine Mandates Caused the Boriswave

If you’re a reader of the Daily Sceptic you don’t need me to tell you that the Covid vaccines were neither safe nor effective. But did you know that they appear to have been responsible for much of the ‘Boriswave’?

Research by Nottingham University concluded that 19,000 care workers quit or were sacked because of their (eminently sensible) refusal to succumb to government coercion pressurising them to accept one of the Covid vaccines. The BMA estimated the number who left the profession at 40,000.

In addition, an unknown number of nurses and doctors quit the NHS as Sajid Javid’s deadline to get jabbed or get sacked approached. In the event, Javid did a U-turn just three days before the deadline, but already thousands had quit.

We know that on January 16th 2022, 80,092 NHS staff (5.4% of the total) remained unvaccinated as the February 3rd deadline approached. Undoubtedly, many of these unvaccinated employees would have retired, found other work or simply quit in the fortnight before the U-turn was announced.

What’s all this got to do with the Boriswave? The answer to that question can be found in a Home Office report published in November 2025 called ‘A Fairer Pathway to Settlement’, which explains that one of the key drivers leading to the relaxation of the immigration rules was the need to fill care worker vacancies. The report, with specific reference to care workers, states:

An attempt to fill between 6,000 and 40,000 jobs saw the arrival of 616,000 individuals from 2022 to 2024. Over half were not even arriving to work in that sector but were instead dependants of those who were.

Let’s just take a moment to digest this. Vaccine mandates in the care sector and the threat of a vaccine mandate for NHS employees in 2021-22 led directly to around 40,000 workers leaving the care sector and an unknown number leaving the NHS. In direct response to this shortfall, 616,000 care workers and their dependants arrived!

In the absence of those mandates, many of the care workers would have stayed in their jobs and we wouldn’t have been issuing visas. Without those visas we wouldn’t now be facing the prospect of granting indefinite leave to remain to most of these 616,000 people, a total equivalent to the population of Manchester.

‘A Fairer Pathway to Settlement‘ provides the useful graphic reproduced in Figure 1. It shows by which path people being granted leave to remain entered the UK. In most cases these migrants arrived five years prior to the year in which leave to remain is expected to be granted. The red line adjacent to the anticipated number of settlement grants expected to be made in 2027 and 2028 highlights those coming from the ‘health and care’ pathway during the Boriswave of 2022 and 2023. Not far off half of the likely migrants expected to stay were made up of this group brought in to replace the vaccine refuseniks.

Occupying the lower end of the income scale, such migrants, we know from OBR and ONS estimates, will cost the taxpayers billions of pounds as they become eligible for state benefits.

Using official data, the Reform Party has produced an interesting paper analysing anticipated the future costs of the various streams of Boriswave migrants subsequent to ‘indefinite leave to remain’ being granted. Using government figures and projections the party forecast a cumulative cost of about £100 billion.

This is yet another hidden cost of the disastrous Covid policies to be placed alongside the explosion in NHS waiting lists, the collapse in the mental health of so many and the loss of workforce efficiency as a consequence of the widespread adoption of home working. None of these societal costs are being reversed any time soon.

Of course, there will be those who will blame the NHS and care workers for not buckling down and just getting the jab. Then they wouldn’t have lost their jobs, and we wouldn’t have needed the 6,000 to 40,000 replacement care workers in the first place and the 616,000 migrants would then never have turned up.

This is not the article to revisit all the arguments against vaccine mandates, but I’m also aware that many Daily Sceptic readers have come to the Sceptic since the Covid fiasco ended and may not be wholly familiar with some of the arguments against these particular vaccines and mandates. Consequently, I’ve included a couple of findings that illustrate how utterly useless the Covid vaccines truly were.

However, the principal objection to the vaccine mandates for me remains a libertarian one. All UK adult citizens have an absolute right to exercise ‘informed consent’ prior to undergoing any medical procedure. Government coercion is absolutely wrong.

As to the vaccines’ real-world uselessness, I’ve included two findings that I find richly amusing.

Firstly, we recall that COVID-19 ‘new cases’ peaked in early January 2022. This was a peak three times higher than any other peak over the course of the pandemic and it occurred some three months after the completion of the rollout of the vaccines at a time when most people had already received three doses. What possible justification could there be for sacking people for not taking these wholly ineffective jabs?

Secondly, check out Figure 3. The data are lifted from the UK Government Covid dashboard and show Covid hospital admissions for the 1,200 days from March 2020, when Covid struck, to spring 2023.

In the first 600 days, a period characterised by repeated lockdowns, masks, vaccine rollouts, threatened Covid passports and a whole panoply of non-pharmaceutical interventions, there were 496,693 reported Covid hospital admissions. In the second 600 days, when virtually the entire population had submitted to multiple jabs, there were 10% more Covid hospital admissions, a total of 548,676.

At every level this is a tale of staggering incompetence and Establishment overreach. How dare the state force perfectly sane people exercising a right to bodily autonomy onto the dole in a futile gesture to shore up the claim that the vaccines were effective. The build-up to the imposition of the vaccine mandates ran right through January 2022, the same month that infections were running at three times the rate that they’d ever previously reached, illustrating perfectly that the vaccines were wholly incapable of preventing people testing positive for Covid.

This is just another legacy of Covid. Another unintended consequence of the most disastrous policy ever enacted by a British government. But this legacy isn’t going anywhere. The 616,000 migrants are here to stay, they will continue to be a drain on the taxpayer, and in any sane world the vacancies they were supposed to fill would never have existed in the first place.