Thousands Urge UK Government to Rehire Care Workers Sacked Over COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate

A doctor prepares the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination center in Halifax, England, on July 31, 2021. Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

Tens of thousands of people have urged the UK government to apologise, reinstate, and compensate care workers who were forced out of their jobs by a COVID-19 vaccine mandate, according to campaign group Together.

By Friday, more than 23,000 people had signed a petition published by the group on Monday, calling on Prime Minister Liz Truss and Health Secretary Thérèse Coffey to reconcile with the approximately 40,000 social care workers who lost their jobs after refusing to take the jabs.

The civil liberty group, which started in 2021 as a campaign against COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates, published a letter on the same day when Janine Small, Pfizer’s president of international developed markets, told the European Parliament that the company’s COVID-19 vaccine had not been tested for its effectiveness on stopping transmission before it entered the market.

The letter said the mandate, introduced by former Health Secretary Sajid Javid, was “wrong in principle, and wrong in practice,” arguing that by the time the mandate came into effect in November 2021, it had been “clear that COVID jabs did not prevent transmission.”

The letter urged the new government to apologise, reinstate, and compensate those who were affected by the mandate in a bid to alleviate staff shortages and restore confidence in the sector.

Together said the signing will close on Oct. 30, when hard copies will be posted to ministers.

Javid: Would ‘Absolutely Not’ Have Done Things Differently

On Wednesday, Javid defended his policy at an event hosted by the Legatum Institute, telling Together’s co-founder Alan Miller that he would not have “done a single thing differently.”

Miller asked Javid whether with hindsight he would have done things differently regarding the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, to which Javid replied, “No, absolutely not.”

“Because when you’re a minister, you have to make decisions based on the facts and information you have in front of you at the time. You’re not able to predict the future,” the former health secretary said.

“But when facts change, then you should also as a minister be able to change your mind on that as well and be practical and sensible. So I wouldn’t have done a single thing differently.”

The vaccine mandate requiring care home staff, volunteers, and visitors to be “fully vaccinated” with COVID-19 vaccines took effect on Nov. 11, 2021.

The government and Parliament had also pushed through a separate vaccine mandate for frontline NHS workers, which never took effect. The stated aim of the policies was to protect patients, with the implication being the vaccines would reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the disease that causes COVID-19.

The NHS vaccine mandate was halted at the 11th hour, before being scrapped a month later. The care home mandate, which had already been in effect for almost four months, was revoked at the same time.

Javid said at the time that the government “makes no apology” for proposing the mandates when the Delta variant of the coronavirus was dominant, arguing it was the right policy at the time as “the weight of clinical evidence in favour of vaccination as a condition of deployment outweighed the risks to the workforce.”

Three weeks before the scheduled NHS mandate was halted, Javid was confronted by NHS doctor Steve James, who said the science supporting a vaccine mandate wasn’t “strong enough” as the reductions of transmission appeared to be short-lived.

The then-health secretary said he respected James’s view, adding, “but there’re also many different views.”