Should bosses make jabs mandatory?

1 minute read

covid vaccine podcast The Tea Room

By

Francine Crimmins

Compulsion should be a last resort when it comes to getting your workforce immunised.

Individuals who work in aged care and quarantine are required by the federal government to be fully vaccinated against covid in order to keep working in their industries.

And in NSW, healthcare, childcare, disability support and other essential industries will have to be fully immunised against covid by the end of the year.

Similarly, private companies are also starting to introduce mandatory vaccination for their employees to return to work.

But should it be left up to individual workplaces to ensure their employees are vaccinated against covid, and how can employers do so in an ethical way?

This episode we’re joined by Dr Jane Williams, a postdoctoral scholar at Sydney Health Ethics, at the University of Sydney, who specialises in public health ethics and policy.

You can listen and subscribe to the show by searching for “The Tea Room Medical Republic” in your favourite podcast player.

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Helen B
Helen B
3 years ago

Delta Variant- Vaccinated are just as infectious (if not more infectious!) than unvaccinated!!
Its possible that in future it will be the vaccinated who will need to be excluded from our Healthcare System!

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3897733
(August 10 2021-Lancet- Very high viral loads in vaccinated healthcare workers with delta infections- often pre-symptoms)

Gibraltar is 99% vaccinated
They have covid! Most are fully vaccinated. (Pfizer)
Herd immunity does not exist.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/60-people-being-admitted-uk-hospitals-had-tw
( July 2021- Reuters- 60% people being admitted to UK hospitals are fully vaccinated- mainly AstraZeneca)

Israel- https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/grim-warning-israel-vaccination-blunts-does-not-defeat-delta
(Israel also has at least 60% hospitalised covid patients are fully vaccinated-Pfizer)

Viral loads with Delta are very high in vaccinated which means they are highly infectious

Be VERY careful discriminating and looking down your nose at your unvaccinated colleagues- it may come back to bite you!!

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Bianca Nogrady
Bianca Nogrady
Reply to  Helen B
3 years ago

Hi, this is your TMR covid blogger here to address a few inaccuracies and errors in this post.
That first preprint study from the Lancet SSRN shows higher viral loads in vaccinated healthcare workers infected with Delta compared to viral loads previously documented in

    unvaccinated individuals infected with previous SARS-CoV-2 variants

(my emphasis). This reflects what has now been seen in many studies of the Delta strain, which is that it is associated with substantially higher viral loads – up to 1000 times higher – than previous variants, in both unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals.
This study doesn’t compare vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals infected with Delta. There has been a recent study that did this, and it found similar viral loads between unvaccinated and vaccinated (but vaccinated individuals have much lower risk and severity of infection, hence the benefit of vaccination). So there’s a reasonable chance vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals with covid can transmit at the same level, but remember that vaccinated people are much less likely to get infected in the first place.
Herd immunity – the protection of unvaccinated individuals by a critical mass of vaccinated individuals – does exist, but it’s not yet known what level of vaccine coverage will be needed to achieve this. Given Delta’s transmissibility, it’s likely to going to need a much higher level of vaccine coverage than previous SARS-CoV-2 variants.
The reasons that far more vaccinated than unvaccinated people are admitted to hospital in the UK and Israel with covid is simple mathematics: if the majority of the population is vaccinated (and in the UK it’s above 80%, with around 10% more having infection-acquired immunity) of course there will be more infections in vaccinated than unvaccinated people.
To illustrate this: if you have 900 people vaccinated and 100 unvaccinated, and all are exposed to the virus, let’s say around 90 vaccinated people will still get infected, and probably around 90 unvaccinated people will get infected: a 50/50 split. Does this mean the vaccine doesn’t work? No, because there are 810 vaccinated people not infected, but only 10 unvaccinated people not infected.
The statistics you need to be looking at are the hospitalisation, intubation and death rates from covid among vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals. Here’s one example: death rates from covid are more than ten times higher in unvaccinated versus vaccinated in Wisconsin: https://www.statista.com/chart/25589/covid-19-infections-vaccinated-unvaccinated/
And a study from New York found vaccination was more than 90% effective at preventing hospitalisation with covid: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e1.htm
Given the outbreaks we’re already seeing in healthcare settings in NSW – and the fatalities that are resulting from those – I would suggest that a decision not to get vaccinated is likely to have far more dire consequences for individuals, their colleagues and their patients, than getting vaccinated.

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Heather
Heather
Reply to  Bianca Nogrady
3 years ago

EXcellent reply Bianca to an error ridden and dangerous post

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Philip
Philip
3 years ago

Details vary from state to state but occupational health and safety legislation requires employers to provide ” a safe and healthy workplace”. This applies to customers as well as employees. Knowingly having unvaccinated employees, would breach that legislation; leaving employers open to prosecution, in the event of an infection. This would apply to any notifiable disease.

Under these circumstances it would be incumbent on an employer to require vaccinations or routine testing, showing negative results.

While it would be better if people acted sensibly, employers have to make their employees get vaccinated or leave. In some settings this could require parting with a person who could not be vaccinated for medical reasons.

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