Meet the medics picking ‘no jab’ over a job
Joe Shute and Eleanor Steafel on the NHS doctors who will soon be looking for work
It has been over a week since Dr Steve James, a consultant anaesthetist at King’s College Hospital in London, accosted Sajid Javid. In front of colleagues, ministerial aides and TV cameras, the 48-year-old told the Health Secretary that he would not be vaccinated because he had immunity from being “antibody positive” after exposure to the virus – and therefore would be forced out of his role in April when the new rules mandating all NHS staff be fully jabbed came into force.
While Javid politely disagreed with James, who has worked at King’s for nearly a decade, he acknowledged that he was entitled to his opinion. Despite a public backlash, with some angry medical staff publicly denouncing James as “an anti-vax wet dream”, he insists that privately he has been inundated with messages of support. “I’ve had dozens of people say: ‘Well done, thank you’,” he says. “There are lots of doctors and nurses from different trusts who are being forced to resign or being sacked.”
At King’s alone, the hospital’s head, Dr Clive Kay, has estimated that the mandatory vaccine policy for healthcare workers could result in the loss of 1,000 staff. Across the NHS, that figure has been put as high as six per cent of the workforce, or more than 80,000 staff.
Many of those who stand to lose their jobs at a time of sustained pressure on the health service stress they are taking the stand not out of an anti-vaxxer position – indeed, those on the front line have seen more than anyone the health benefits the vaccines have delivered in lowering rates of hospitalisation and serious disease – but out of a fear that removing the option of choice sets a dangerous precedent.
The Government insists the mandate for NHS workers to have at least two doses of the vaccine is backed up by compelling evidence.
When James accosted the Health Secretary, he claimed “the vaccines
‘People don’t realise how this is going to devastate the country’
are reducing transmission only for about eight weeks with delta”, adding: “For omicron, it’s probably less.” He has since said he was referring to a study that found that a vaccinated person with Covid was just two per cent less likely than an unvaccinated person to pass it on, 12 weeks after a second Astrazeneca jab, and acknowledged that his reference to “eight weeks” had been an error. But the same study also found that people vaccinated with the Pfizer jab had a 25 per cent lower risk of infecting others than unvaccinated people after 12 weeks.
James is insistent that pushing ahead with the policy in the face of an exodus is a blinkered reaction to a climate of fear. “We’ve been through cycles of fear through these lockdowns,” he says. “And that’s affected people’s psyches.”
When he leaves King’s, James hopes to remain a clinician and has made enquiries about working in Ireland. He is also considering jobs in Wales and Scotland, where the devolved governments have so far resisted vaccine mandates. Others among his colleagues who will be forced to leave the hospital in April have less of an idea about future careers.
Intensive care consultant Dr Milena Chee has tested positive for Covid antibodies, meaning at some point she contracted the virus. She does not know when, but having worked on the front line since the first days of the pandemic, “when, over a weekend, one patient turned into 30”, she is not surprised.
Chee, who declines to give her age but has been working at King’s since 2013, and within the NHS since 2009, says she has seen “hundreds” of patients succumb to the virus and stresses Covid is an “awful disease”. At the same time, she acknowledges the higher proportion of unvaccinated patients being hospitalised – a figure which Javid claimed was around 70 per cent on the King’s Covid wards during his visit.
She also disputes any health fears over the vaccine. “I want to underline that the vaccine is safe, and certainly it is much better to be vaccinated,” she says. “What I’m against is a person’s vaccination status to be tied to employment rights. I’m against the language of hatred, which is rampant. We are supposed to be such a tolerant society, but all of a sudden have become the complete opposite.”
As the sole breadwinner in her family, with her partner a stay-at-home husband looking after their 11-year-old son, she admits leaving the job she loves comes at a high personal price.
“I do not have a job lined up after April,” she says. “This is a source of enormous anxiety for me and my family. Not only will I lose a job I absolutely adore, and one I’m very good at, but I’m not sure how I will move forward at the moment.”
Elsewhere in the NHS, colleagues have reportedly started wearing purple ribbons on their uniforms to demonstrate their opposition to mandatory vaccinations.
When former health secretary Matt Hancock announced in March 2021 that care home workers would be mandated to have Covid vaccinations (a policy that came into force in November), he stressed there was a “clear precedent” for the ruling because NHS staff who come into contact with the blood of patients are already required to have a vaccination for hepatitis B. While this policy is enforced by NHS trusts across England, it is not a legal ruling.
Many of those now refusing to have a Covid jab have had their hepatitis B vaccination and seasonal flu jabs but say the two are not comparable as the latter are not required in law.
Among them is Dr Simon Fox, a 41-year-old consultant in infectious diseases working across the South East, who has spent 15 years in the NHS. He contracted the virus working on Covid wards in the early days of the pandemic and, though he was “bad for a week”, avoided being hospitalised. He has also cared for colleagues left “extremely ill” by the virus. “I haven’t lost any colleagues, but I know of people who have succumbed,” he says.
He stresses it is not the vaccine he is opposing, but the mandate. Indeed, he argues that, far from persuading reluctant staff to have their jabs, the policy will in fact fuel anti-vaxxer sentiment. “What they have done by being so coercive on vaccines and ramming them down people’s throats is making people extremely sceptical and suspicious,” he says. “It is very hard to undo that.”
Sutton GP Dr Fui Mee Quek has spent much of her 28-year career persuading reluctant patients to have vaccines. The 57-year-old mother-ofthree, who was born in Brighton and has worked in the same practice for almost her entire career, says she has always been an advocate of vaccines – but has been reluctant to receive a Covid jab because of a lack of longterm safety data.
She says the feared loss of key NHS workers at a time of widespread staff shortages could have a huge effect on patients. “It’s going to have a massive impact,” she says. “It’s going to devastate the country, and I don’t think people realise it.”
Quek says she will, in all likelihood, retire when she leaves her practice, and insists she is fully supported by her husband and family. She says she is speaking out publicly on behalf of younger NHS staff with their careers ahead of them.
She makes the same point many do, that the same politicians who stood on their doorsteps and applauded NHS workers during the pandemic, now seem all too willing to turn their backs on them.
“The people they were clapping for will lose their jobs,” she says. “People who have worked so hard will have to leave.”