Birmingham MP Shabana Mahmood leads opposition to compulsory jabs for NHS staff
Health Secretary Sajid Javid is considering forcing all front-line health workers to get a Covid-19 vaccine
Birmingham MP Shabana Mahmood is leading opposition to plans to force every NHS worker to get a Covid-19 vaccine.
Health Secretary Sajid Javid, the MP for Bromsgrove, said he is "leaning towards" making the jabs compulsory for staff in England, because around 100,000 NHS workers are not fully vaccinated. It follows the decision to tell care home workers that they must be vaccinated. From November 11, anyone who has not been fully vaccinated will be barred from entering a residential care home providing nursing or personal care, unless they are a resident.
But Labour opposes the police, and is now campaigning against extending it to cover NHS staff. Ms Mahmood, MP for Birmingham Ladywood, spoke out against the proposal in her role as Labour’s National Campaign Co-ordinator. She said it would lead to staff shortages in the health service, and might actually make people more reluctant to take the vaccine.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Westminster Hour, she said: "On NHS staff, same as care workers, we haven’t supported compulsory vaccination because the cohort of people that we’re talking about, who work in the NHS, who haven’t taken up the vaccination, is disproportionately at the lower paid end of NHS workers.
"We’re talking primarily about women, lower paid women and also some ethnic minority communities. And the profile of those people is the same as you’ll see across the rest of the population – there’s huge amounts of vaccine hesitancy."
She said women who hoped to become pregnant were particularly reluctant to be vaccinated because they feared it would affect their fertility. NHS advice is that there's no evidence COVID-19 vaccines have any effect on chances of becoming pregnant.
Ms Mahmood said the answer was to give people information and advice. "Simply, the blunt instrument of mandating workers in the NHS as we’ve seen in the care home sector doesn’t work. It’ll lead to labour shortages, it’ll just build the programme of hesitancy and bake that in to our wider system and we can’t have that."