Australia to Suspend Unvaccinated Health Workers Without Pay, Despite the Fact That Many May Have Natural Immunity

Covid-19 : le vaccin Pfizer-BioNTech neutralise une ...

Australian authorities have announced that they plan on suspending unvaccinated health workers without pay in a move that has been denounced as infringing on human rights.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has discussed the matter alongside calls for a national approach on how to deal with health workers who refuse to get the Covid-19 vaccine.

According to News.com.au, the new rules will apply to public hospitals, ambulance services, private hospitals, general practitioners, private nurse offices, consulting offices, pharmacies and private pathology centres. Under the new mandate, all health workers in these establishments must get the Covid-19 jab.

Some Australian states such as Queensland and New South Wales (NSW) have already introduced vaccine mandates for health workers. In NSW, approximately 94 percent of health workers have received the jab, but more than 5,000 have yet to line up and submit to the experimental vaccine. With NSW’s first dose deadline already passed on September 30th, many unvaccinated health workers now face termination starting from the 1st of October.

NSW Health Minister, Brad Hazzard, said: “It’s pretty simple. If you don’t care enough to get vaccinated and look after your colleagues [and] if you don’t care enough about your patient, you probably shouldn’t be in the health system.”

In Queensland, nearly 1 in 10 out of 1115,000 healthcare workers remain unvaccinated. The state’s Health Minister Yvette D’Ath has implored workers to get injected with the Covid-19 vaccine as soon as possible.

D’Ath said: “We require our health workers to get vaccinated for a range of immunisations. This is about keeping them, their work colleagues and their own family members safe.”

Currently, three Australian states – Victoria, South Australia and the Northern Territory – are yet to finalise the mandatory vaccination guidelines for healthcare workers. However, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) wants all workers in the health sector to get the vaccine with only legitimate medical exemptions allowed.

Despite this, the mandates have faced significant criticism from the opposition. Australian Federal Member of Parliament, George Christensen, has slammed compulsory vaccination. He compared the mandate to slavery and “medical apartheid” in an online broadcast.

Christensen said: “The whole rationale for mandating the [COVID-19 vaccine] in the workplace, it’s not fair. [All] the rest of the vaccine discrimination and medical apartheid [that] certain politicians are proposing, it’s not borne out by the facts.

“This is not an [anti-vaccine] thing. This is about freedom [and] about choice. [It’s] about saying to both governments and corporations – ‘You know what, we might be your employee, but we’re not your chattel. We’re no longer in a slave relationship where you can demand certain things be done with my body.’”

Other countries have also introduced vaccine mandates for healthcare workers. France has made the Covid-19 vaccine mandatory for those workers in a healthcare setting, which has led to 3,000 workers being suspended without pay for refusing the jab.

Additionally, Singapore has introduced a similar mandate, requiring those who refuse the vaccine to pay for Covid-19 testing themselves, whilst excluding them from Covid-19 medical benefits. These new rules were implemented on August 23rd.

Currently, in the UK, the Covid-19 vaccines have been made mandatory for health and care sector workers. Matt Hancock previously stated that those who refuse the jab by 11th November (unless medically exempt) will face being suspended or losing their job. However, recently, a UK government minister has suggested that unvaccinated health care workers could be moved to back-office roles.

Helen Whately, the minister for care, said in an interview with Times Radio: “You can look at whether there are alternative ways somebody could be deployed, for instance, in a role that doesn’t involve frontline work, or doesn’t involve being physically in the same setting as the patient – whether it’s, for instance, working on 111, something like that.”

The UK government have said that they are looking at “alternative roles” for individuals who do not get the Covid-19 vaccine.

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