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The government have announced a consultation on ending COVID-19 vaccination as a condition of deployment in health and all social care settings.
Prof Jonathan Ball, Professor of Molecular Virology, University of Nottingham, said:
“Any policy needs to be based on scientific understanding. We know that two vaccine doses do not offer significant protection from infection, especially against variants such as Omicron.
“Therefore, the premise that fully vaccinated – defined by having received two doses of vaccine – healthcare workers are less likely to pass on virus to those they care is likely untrue. It might be the case that the fully vaccinated carers are less infectious to others, either because they shed less virus or shed virus for a shorter period, but we need to gather the evidence. In the meantime, the absence of such data would suggest that any reduction in transmission risk that vaccination may provide is likely to be short-lived at best, or even non-existent, and should not be relied on to reduce infection and transmission.
“But we need to remember that there is still a significant population of highly vulnerable people, and we need to ensure that we protect them as best we can. For example, continued regular testing of carers, especially those in contact with the most vulnerable populations, may be a far more effective protective measure than a blanket vaccine mandate.”
Dr Peter English, Retired Consultant in Communicable Disease Control, Former Editor of Vaccines in Practice, past Chair of the BMA Public Health Medicine Committee, said:
“This decision reflects the dilemma faced by the health secretary.
“It would appear to be an attempt to balance the harms due to the avoidable risks to patients and staff that arise when staff continue to work, unvaccinated, and thus more likely to infect their colleagues and patients, against the risks of staff shortages in a context of an already depleted NHS.”
Dr Ben Kasstan, a medical anthropologist at the University of Bristol, said:
“There are precedents for requiring frontline healthcare workers to be vaccinated, for example, against hepatitis b, and the requirement for healthcare workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19 was also introduced in the USA and France. It is, of course, important to review policies and procedures to ensure healthcare services operate according to the latest evidence and in this case, transmission risk. The pandemic, however, has not ended – COVID-19 is very much with us and a critical threshold of people in the UK have not yet been vaccinated with three-doses. Available data suggests just 64.9% of the UK population have received a booster or third dose. Health protection is always a political operation and questions remain around the timing of this government U-turn. One question I am left with is whether the Conservative Party may be attempting to by-pass criticisms of lockdown festivities and the Sue Gray report by trying to make concessions where possible, and to convey that the UK is looking forward to a post-pandemic reality that has not yet arrived.”
All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:
www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19
Declared interests
Dr Peter English: “Dr English is on the editorial board of Vaccines Today: an unpaid, voluntary, position. While he is also a member of the BMA’s Public Health Medicine Committee (and its chair until Oct 2020), this comment is made in a personal capacity. Dr English sometimes receives honoraria for acting as a consultant to various vaccine manufacturers, most recently to Seqirus.”
None others received.