I was refused a jab – and I’m a key worker

I read with interest your article ‘Voters: Make key workers have jab’. I am a serving prison officer and was informed last week that we were now classed as care workers, and therefore entitled to have a Covid vaccination.

I made my appointment and drove to the Lincolnshire Showground, only to be refused a jab at the door as staff had just been informed that they were not to vaccinate police officers or prison officers. I know for a fact that I have not been the only one to be turned away.

I thought it quite amusing that voters want key workers to have the jab, yet I have been turned away at the door.

Name and address supplied

The vaccine should be compulsory for everyone, unless a GP certifies that a health risk exists. The option not to be vaccinated should be removed. Repeated failure to comply should ultimately lead to arrest and forced vaccination.

Tony Nicholson, London

The minute you make the vaccine compulsory is the minute you have lost democracy and the freedom of choice of every person in this country. Once you do one thing that loses that, it will happen with more and more things and before long we will become a dictatorial nation and we will lose all our freedoms.

T. Smith, Poole

It’s shocking how quickly it’s gone from ‘vaccinate the vulnerable and elderly’ to ‘if you refuse a vaccine you should be cast out of society’. Madness.

D. Thomas, London

Why should a key worker be forced to take it? I’m a key worker and I’ve continued to carry out my job throughout this past year, putting myself at risk while others get to work from home or not at all. It should be a personal choice whether or not I have the jab.

L. Miller, Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire

Why would you want an unvaccinated health worker to give you treatment? We need to make this compulsory.

S. Murray, Essex

It’s hardly the ‘nation’s verdict’, when Deltapoll have interviewed just 1,527 people. The trouble with these polls is that the questions are very weighted to provide the answers the pollsters want and are not necessarily reflective of the view of the public at large.

L. Gadsby, Truro

Everyone should have the vaccine. If it helps towards getting back to normality, we should all do our part.

B. Wood, West Midlands

As a key worker, I demand that everybody who says I must have the jab must have had it themselves (I have received it, actually, but that was my choice, not someone else’s to make for me).

K. Smith, Belfast

Once we start accepting that individuals do not have the power to make decisions about their own body, it’s a very slippery slope.

B. Thompson, Somerset