Mandatory vaccines for health workers could be due a U-turn

Ministers could decide today in favour of a U-turn on the requirement for NHS staff to be double-vaccinated.

Under current rules, front-line NHS workers in England must be fully vaccinated by 1 April, and are required to have received their first jab by Thursday 3 February.

But ministers will meet later to decide whether or not to scrap the requirement due to the ongoing staffing crisis in healthcare. It’s estimated that around 77,000 NHS staff are not vaccinated.

Last week, health secretary Sajid Javid said the requirement was being kept under review but admitted that when the policy was announced, the dominant variant was the more serious Delta.

Unions have put the Department of Health and Social Care under pressure to reverse the requirement. The Royal College of Midwives said the policy could have a “catastrophic impact” on maternity services. Both the Royal College of GPs and Royal College of Nursing called for the requirement to be delayed.

NHS workers who oppose the policy have already staged protests in major cities including London, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds.

Chief secretary to the Treasury Simon Clarke told the BBC that the “fundamental facts” had changed since the emergence of the Omicron variant due to its lesser severity than Delta, so a decision would take this into account.

If the policy is reversed, there will also be calls to change the requirement for staff in frontline social care settings to be double vaccinated. The National Care Association estimates the sector has lost around 40,000 people since vaccines became mandatory in November.

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Chair Nadra Ahmed said: “The people who we’ve lost, we hope they’ll think about coming back and we will do everything we can to try and encourage them to come back, but they will have found other roles and they may be happier in their other roles now and not want to move again.”

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