Nana Akua: If you work in a care home, you should be mandated to get the jab

I am going to mention the dreaded C word... No not Christmas, Covid.

I am an absolute advocate for people to get the jab, I worked with the Department of Health and Social Care to encourage ethnic minorities to have the vaccination. It makes perfect sense to me that the vaccine which reduces your chance of catching the virus, will then have the knock on effect of reducing the spread, and if you do catch the virus, whilst you might feel pretty groggy, you are much less likely to die of the disease.

I am also in total agreement that if you work in a care home, you should be mandated to get the jab, with obvious exceptions for those who are unable to do so medically. This has already happened. I don’t want to put my relative in a care home where those around them remain unvaccinated. Even more so if my elderly relative is having to fund their care, by selling a house.

It’s common sense that those who work in these settings have a duty of care to their patients especially as these patients are the ones who are statistically more likely to die if they catch Covid. So it seems the next obvious thing to do is to protect people in hospitals in the same manner.

Health secretary Sajid Javid wants to bring in legislation to mandate Covid vaccines for all NHS staff. Over 100,000 NHS Staff remain unvaccinated, that’s about 7%. Now you would think given the latest statistics that the majority of people in hospital with covid are those who are unvaccinated, that getting vaccinated would be a no brainer to those especially who work in that setting.

Health groups are warning staff who don’t comply could be sacked or moved from frontline rolls if the legislation is passed. Yes I believe antibody testing could also play a roll and perhaps we should be doing some form of that and as we are also being told that natural immunity is more powerful than any vaccine. But that aside, I simply don’t get the outrage and refusal to have the jab from NHS staff who work around the most vulnerable in hospital settings. Maybe you can explain it to me.