“We understand between about 17 and 20 percent of staff in services are saying they definitely won’t have it,” she said, “and then you’ve got the rest who’re waiting to see.”
Therefore, she said, potentially 40 percent of the workers would decide against taking the vaccine.
She said it’s “stunning” that such a high percentage of care home workers may not want to take the vaccine because “they’ve been working and seeing the direct results of the impact of this virus.”
She also said that the take-up of flu vaccine among care workers “isn’t very good” either.
“I think in the NHS they’re incentivized to have it, which seems quite perverse in some ways,” she said. “We can’t make people, it’s not in their contract currently that they have to have these vaccines.”
In an email to The Epoch Times, Ahmed said her figures were drawn from “an internal survey of a few care providers in our membership and reinforced by other representative bodies involved in social care.”
Ahmed did not confirm which representative bodies were consulted or how large the sample size was.
