Employer has obligation to provide a safe and healthy environment

THE current conversation debating whether vaccination should be mandatory, should become null and void in the greater workplace and marketplace.

There is an obligation on the retailer, hotelier, restaurateur etc., and particularly the employer in the health sector, manufacturing and mining place to provide a safe and healthy environment to both the employee and the customer. Legislation demands and mandates this.

Sanitisers, masks, social distancing and vaccination are the tools to facilitate a safe and healthy retail and work environment.

So, the yes, no and maybe discourse, is superfluous in this context.

Discard all the muddy water, the obfuscatory objections and focus only on the facts.

We know, yes we do, that vaccination minimises infection to a degree, and serious illness, hospitalisation and death to a significant degree.

We know, yes we do, that vaccination has relatively (global experience) little significant risk. At all.

We know, yes we do, that not reducing pockets and populations of the unvaccinated is fertile ground for our foe, the virus, to heinously mutate, with all the problems that creates.

For so long, we have been a society schooled in the value of vaccination and the mandatory expectation for vaccination for travel, schooling etc.

Why now is it any different? There is no expected mind shift. It's not a new precept.

I advocate immediate mandatory vaccination in the health sector, workplace and the marketplace. As a minimum.

If there are the recalcitrant stubbornly refuse vaccination, then they must not enter without a regular, prescribed test, repeated and repeated and repeated. For their cost.

If they contract Covid they should receive no benefits, by way of sick leave, incapacity and perhaps even medical aid cover.

We cannot rely only on sanitisers, masks and social distancing, all three modalities ineffectively practised by so many.