Low NHS jab uptake gives me the needle

CONSULTATION began last week on whether a “jabs for jobs” policy should be applied to workers in the NHS. It was deemed necessary because of the worrying number of staff who remain unvaccinated, but here’s a key question: Consult over what?

The official figures released last week were disturbing. There are approximately 151,000 NHS staff who have not been vaccinated, amounting to a fraction over 10 per cent of the entire workforce.

Among care home workers the number is about 52,000, equivalent to one in six.

Alarmingly, in some parts of the country the take-up is even lower among ethnic minority staff. London is a prime example, with almost 20 per cent of NHS staff having not had either jab.

This is truly astonishing. If you need treatment in a hospital at the moment, quite rightly you have to take a test to show you don’t have Covid and agree to isolate for a period to ensure you don’t take it into the hospital. So how does that square with hospital staff, and at care homes, not getting the jab?

Care home staff in England have now been told vaccinations will be compulsory and the Government will bring in legislation that will cover agency staff and people visiting for work such as hairdressers and chiropodists too.

They might point to the fact they have daily tests – but that’s nothing like the same level of protection. Just because symptoms might not be showing at nine in the morning, it hardly means they won’t by four in the afternoon.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson and a raft of ministers are reported to be backing this, but predictably Labour appears to be up for causing a problem.

They claim compulsory vaccination would be “threatening” for staff at this time, highlighting that a few months ago we were standing outside our homes applauding these workers, and now the Government is limbering up to possibly fire them.

But any “threat” here lies to the patients. Why should someone’s life be put in jeopardy because staff refuse to be vaccinated? Don’t they have a “human right” to be protected?

Accepting there is a vanishingly small

number of people who could suffer severe adverse reaction to the jab, there can be no other excuses.

One charity says staff who object should be offered “education”, but this is at total odds with what we’re told is going on in our hospitals and care homes.

For much of the past 15 months we’ve been fed a diet that the NHS has been on the verge of collapse, with exhausted and

demoralised staff battling against a ceaseless tide of Covid patients arriving on their wards.

Nurses and others have worked day and night to repeatedly turn victims from their back on to their chest and then over again, just to help them draw breath.

If this graphic reality of the dangers of Covid hasn’t served as a wake-up call for the need to get the jab, then nothing will. Get ready for an army of lawyers to go to war with the Government if this becomes a reality – which it should.

They’ll cite the Equality Act which, they’ll claim, affords staff protection.

But there is a precedent as any staff who work in operating theatres must have had a hepatitis B vaccine.

The Covid jabs are exactly the same, and any bleating about “human rights” is just plain wrong.

FOR the second time in as many weeks, I find myself agreeing withtony Blair. Earlier this month it was the suggestion that people who have had both vaccinations should be able to travel without fearing lengthy quarantine when they return.

And last week Blair was bang on again when he said almost six million white-collar jobs are at risk of vanishing overseas if the working from home revolution continues.

Typically, these are jobs such as graphic designers, accountants and IT staff.

Let’s hope this stirs as many of you as possible to get back into the office, before you’re dropped for far cheaper alternatives from countries such as India, Vietnam andthailand.

Meantime, if I find myself agreeing with Mr Blair again I promise to seek urgent help.

IT WAS only after I pressed Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer for the FIFTH time over whether paedophile and child killer Colin Pitchfork should be released on parole that he conceded the decision needed to

“be looked at”.

And Labour wonders why the plain-speaking folk of the Midlands and the North have turned their backs on them, while in the Home Counties they now seem to be trailing behind the

Greens...

ADMITTEDLY it’s a weird name but I assure you while it is both crisp and creamy, it doesn’t taste of honey.

The South African Honey Drop Chardonnay is £13 at Majestic.

A SAD but true assessment of modern-day so-called comedy came from Ab Fab star Jennifer Saunders last week, when she said her hit sitcom almost certainly wouldn’t have been made today. And when you recall so much of it featured her character’s irresponsible drinking, foul treatment of her wonderful Mum and appalling parenting of her geeky daughter, she’s probably right. Jennifer explained that culture has “changed the comedy we used to make”, adding: “I think we’d probably talk ourselves out of most of it now.” The show initially ran between 1992 and 1996 and was then revived in 2001, when it ran for another three years. The chilling truth is, this appalling slide into the po-faced world of woke – where laughs are very few and far between – has taken a little over a decade to take such a strong hold. Quite where the world of comedy might be in another 10 years or so is no laughing matter.