Not content with making everyone’s lives as miserable as possible since March 2020, and just when most people’s lives are returning to ‘normal’, the British government is now targeting a specific group of people and ensuring that a great many of them are unable to sleep at night for fear of losing their jobs. Of course, I am referring to our already hard-pressed and victimised care home workers. This veritable ‘army’ of people who were unjustly and unwisely exposed to COVID-19 when the government transported older hospital inpatients to nursing homes without the proper protective equipment are now being forced, on pain of dismissal, into having a COVID-19 vaccine compulsorily forced into them. This is a simple violation of human rights and, quoting from the UK Human Rights Blog: “only those who cannot be vaccinated for clinical reasons are exempt. Religious and philosophical beliefs do not suffice. As well as workers, the Regulations ban a large variety of tradespeople who might need to visit a care home.”
We already know that 25% of care home workers have objections to taking a COVID-19 vaccine and the CommunityCare website predicts that the sector, already plagued by staff shortages, could lose 40,000 staff. Apart from the injustice and immorality of the move towards compulsory vaccination, this is just madness. Care home owners have expressed concern over the move and the likely detrimental effect on staff numbers. But, to stiffen their resolve and pour encourager les autres, the ‘Care’ Quality Commission have issued a statement saying: “Registered persons (registered managers, registered providers) will need to ensure that they do not allow anyone entry into a care home unless they have had a complete course of an authorised vaccine or fall into one of the groups exempt from being vaccinated.” They will also audit that the care homes have a “robust governance process” in place to enforce the compulsory vaccination of their workers. Presumably those caring people at the Care Quality Commission will include the robustness of the measures and the extent of compliance in their important ratings of care homes whereby hang the careers and jobs of care home owners and workers.
The move is grossly unfair. While folk were out on the street spuriously clapping for the carers—explicitly those in the NHS—the care home workers were largely ignored. As unpleasant as it is to wear, the NHS at least staff had full personal protective equipment. We were remined of this and of the hard-pressed doctors and nurses daily in the mainstream media. Others in the NHS had the relative luxury of sitting about doing precisely nothing in the white elephants once referred to as the Nightingale wards. The narrative was one of hard pressed, exhausted NHS staff who were ‘overwhelmed’. But some of them were clearly not sufficiently overwhelmed to make copious and vacuous Tik Tok videos. Meantime, in the care homes, the staff were not fully protected and their patients—transported out of hospital to ‘save the NHS’—were dropping like flies with 42,341 of them allegedly dying of COVID-19. The move is even more unfair considering that NHS staff are not required to be compulsorily vaccinated. But the government is ‘consulting’ on it.
It is hardly surprising that many care home workers are rejecting the jab. The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines is exaggerated. The government itself continually undermines the use of the vaccines. And the COVID-19 vaccines are not without their well-publicised risks, including death. For those who have had it, life has barely changed. As with the issue of vaccine passports, mandatory vaccination is discriminatory. We already know that some black and ethnic minority communities are resistant to vaccination and these groups are disproportionately represented among care home staff. So mandatory COVID-19 vaccination will affect them disproportionately. The response from one of the major trade unions, UNITE, representing workers in the care home sector, while advocating ‘Encouragement, not compulsion’ regarding vaccination of care home workers has, nevertheless, along with some other unions been muted. I hear, however, that the representation of care home staff by trade unions in the sector over the issue has been poor. One exception has been the Workers of England Union* who have successfully represented several care home staff over mandatory vaccination, thus setting a precedent. They have been very actively representing the rights of care home workers who are resisting mandatory vaccination. The Workers of England Union also provide excellent advice in the form of a fact sheet for workers on how to respond to a request for mandatory vaccination.
The move towards mandatory vaccination of care home workers is wrong, it should be exposed as such and resisted as much as possible. If we don’t do that, mandatory COVID-19 vaccination may soon be coming to a workplace near you.
*the author is a member of the Workers of England Union
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