COVID Vaccine Mandate in English Care Homes Linked to Major Staff Reductions: Report

Authors didn’t find evidence that the mandate reduced COVID deaths among care home residents

A care home resident holding hands with her daughter on Oct. 29, 2021. Andrew Matthews/PA

A study has found that the COVID vaccine mandate in English care homes led to fewer staff but may not have reduced resident deaths.

A report has looked into the effects of the 2021 COVID vaccine mandate for staff in elderly care homes in England and has found that the only major causal effect was a reduction in the number of unvaccinated care workers.

COVID-19 vaccinations were made compulsory for all staff working in care homes in England from Nov. 11, 2021.

At the time it was warned such a policy for care workers would cause unknown staff shortages. However, the government said that there were to be “unquantified benefits” from the mandate, which it believed were “fairly substantial and long-lasting.”

Many social care workers left their jobs as a result, which campaign groups said is a “devasting blow.” The sector is now struggling to fill around 165,000 vacancies.

Only Exacerbating Staffing Difficulties

Using weekly data at the local authority level, the study, by Professor of industrial economics at Business School David Paton and Professor of Industrial Economics Sourafel Girma, who are both at Nottingham University, looked at the impact of the vaccine mandate for elderly care homes in England on vaccine take-up, staffing levels, and mortality.

The study found that the mandate was successful in reducing the percentage of unvaccinated workers, but this came at the cost of a reduction in net staffing in the sector. The authors said that they also didn’t find any evidence that the mandate reduced COVID deaths among residents.

A major concern when the English policy was introduced was that mandatory vaccination would lead to carers leaving the sector, exacerbating staffing difficulties. The evidence in the study confirms the mandate did have a significant effect in this regard.

As a result of the mandate, the care workforce declined by about 14,000 to 18,000 carers.

Radical Policy With Radical Implications

Paton told The Epoch Times that the sector has traditionally had a really difficult time retaining workers which has a bearing on the level of care that elderly residents receive.

Paton is also part of HART, an organisation that was set up to share concerns about policy and guidance recommendations relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“One of the things the mandate did is that some workers left voluntarily because they decided not to get vaccinated. Others were sacked,” he said.

“A lot of these were replaced with agency workers, and there’s evidence that over-reliance on agency workers, as opposed to more permanent employees, can have implications for the care of residents,” he said.

“There was a cost if you like from the mandate coming in and unfortunately there doesn’t seem like there’s any benefit in terms of mortality,” he added.

Paton said that the government’s impact assessment data assumed that 40,000 workers would leave, but that most workers would be replaced by vaccinated workers, though a significant number were not.

While not part of the study, he said that he believed that because the government relied on coercion and pressure, including vaccine mandates, people have lost some trust in the overall messaging of vaccines.

“Even when the mandate was in autumn 2021 it was already fairly clear that the effectiveness of vaccination against infection, which is relevant here, was much less than hoped for,” he said.

He said that there was good government data that infection rates were if anything higher among some age groups higher among those who were vaccinated compared to the group that was unvaccinated.

“Looking back, it’s quite hard to see why we pursued quite a radical policy with radical implications for workers, which changed how the UK approached vaccinations,” he said.

The Together Declaration, co-founded by Alan Miller, has an ongoing campaign to get the government to apologise, reinstate and compensate fired care workers told The Epoch Times that “nobody should ever be forced to take a medical procedure against their will.”

Miller said that the sector is “massively lacking in staff with a 165,000 shortfall, particularly a lack of experienced staff.”

“That is why this government should apologise, compensate, reinstate those lost,” he said.

“Regardless of how effective or not anything is, it must never be mandated. There are also so many concerns with side effects and deaths, far higher than a usual cost-benefit analysis would support. This has been a dark stain on many that have pursued this policy,” said Miller.

Legal Claims

In the UK, employment tribunals have mostly ruled that care home workers who refused to get COVID-19 vaccinations were fairly dismissed by their employers.

Stephen Jackson, solicitor at Jackson Osborne Employment Lawyers, had pushed for a judicial review, with a case brought by Julie Peters and Nicola Findlay, respectively a programme director and a full-time support worker at a care home who both lost their jobs. The High Court threw the case out in November 2021.

“If someone tried to do that today, then the same claims could be made today and the prospects could be greater,” Jackson previously told The Epoch Times.

Jackson said that it is unlikely that an employer would be able to get away with such a course of action today.

“The employers relied on the protection of the government policy, saying that it was justified to have required the injection to attend work,” he said.

“The government has changed that policy as it can’t even be argued to be justified anymore,” he said.

Jackson added that an employer who puts requirements for a COVID-19 vaccine today as part of the job description could find themselves “exposed to various claims.”

The Department of Health did not respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times.