Expert sees ‘lots of problems’ in mandatory jabs

MANDATORY Covid vaccinations would cause “lots of problems”, Newcastle’s top public health official says.

As new Plan B restrictions were announced to curb the spread of the Omicron variant, Prime Minister Boris Johnson called for a “national conversation” about how we deal with the pandemic crisis.

The Prime Minister said at Wednesday’s press conference that restrictions cannot carry on indefinitely “just because a substantial proportion of the population still, sadly, has not got vaccinated”, though health secretary Sajid Javid has branded the prospect of forcing people to get jabbed unethical.

Mr Johnson’s press conference last night urged people to get their third jabs – but does not force them to.

Prof Eugene Milne, Newcastle’s public health director, believes that there can still be “an effective level of population coverage” for Covid vaccines without making them a requirement.

He told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “I think there would be lots of problems with it [mandatory vaccination] and we have further that we can go in encouraging people to take up vaccines.

“We still have people coming through for first doses who had not taken up the offer so far.

“What the Prime Minister said is that there would need to be a debate and I don’t want to prejudge any of that.

“But we don’t have mandatory vaccines for the population elsewhere and we can still manage to get very high uptake of childhood vaccination programmes, for example, where we get upwards of 90% uptake.

“There are ways to get an effective level of population coverage that we want to pursue first.”

Austria is set to make Covid vaccines mandatory for everyone over the age of 14 from February, while Greece will issue monthly fines to over-60s who refuse to get a jab.

But Mr Javid said mandatory vaccination is “unethical and also at a practical level it wouldn’t work”.

The health secretary said that coming forward to get your dose “should be a positive decision”.

The Prime Minister said that he “didn’t want us to have a society and a culture where we force people to get vaccinated, I don’t think that’s ever been the way we do things in this country”.

But if the vaccines are shown to be capable of “holding” the Omicron variant then he added that “there is going to come a point” when “we are going to have to have a conversation about ways in which we deal with this pandemic”.

Mr Johnson said: “I don’t believe we can keep going indefinitely with non-pharmaceutical interventions, restrictions on people’s way of life, just because a substantial proportion of the population still sadly, has not got vaccinated.”

There are ways to get an effective level of population coverage that we want to pursue first Prof Eugene Milne