Health-care workers who don’t believe in vaccines are in the wrong job

On Thursday, Ontario becomes the first province to impose a mandatory policy on vaccinations for long-term-care workers.

For better or for worse, there is nothing much mandatory about it.

In fact, there will be no compelled vaccination — just compiled information and compulsory education. No required injection, merely a request for reflection.

It’s a promising first step, even if there is no assurance of reaching the final destination of maximum vaccination. Sixteen months after COVID-19 started killing people — first and foremost elderly residents of long-term-care homes — Ontario is circling back to track the outliers, yet still far from forcing them out.

As of last week, 83 per cent of those workers had been fully vaccinated, the Ministry of Health tells me. That leaves 17 per cent short of the mark, which isn’t all that impressive considering they’ve had since last December to get the jab.

In total, 92 per cent had received at least one vaccination, suggesting that eight per cent remain hard core refuseniks who, at this late stage, are in no hurry to protect anyone at all, at any time. Bear in mind that these percentages are averages that apply to the entire provincial system; while staff in some facilities could be up to 100 per cent vaccinated, others might be barely 70 per cent in compliance — with potentially three in 10 workers unvaccinated, leaving the rest of us in the dark.

More than 14,000 residents in nursing homes lost their lives to COVID-19 across Canada. Given that brutal death toll, it is hard to fathom how some long-term-care outliers can still refuse immunization on grounds of conscience, ignorance or defiance.

We have long celebrated our health-care heroes — the vast majority of whom have done everything right, going above and beyond the call of duty. Shouldn’t we also hold the non-heroic workers to account, the stubborn minority who refuse to comprehend their duty of care?

Under the new policy, long-term-care operators must submit statistics monthly of who got the shot. Unvaccinated employees must then submit to seminars on the science of vaccines.

Some might call it brainwashing or compelled thought. You know, like compulsory education in our primary and secondary schools — where vaccinations are also, incidentally, compulsory (with limited exceptions).

Lest we forget, that doesn’t mean students are tied down and their parents restrained while needles are forced upon the unwilling. That’s not the meaning of mandatory.

To be clear, students who reject the rules are refused admission to class. That’s an important precedent worth stressing in this time of anti-vaxx distress and dissent.

As we try to safeguard lives in nursing homes, hospitals, schools and workplaces across the country, what is the reasonable standard for protecting those who most need protection? What constitutes a safe health-care facility, and a safe workplace — and how we do provide consistency?

Good on the Ontario government for testing the waters. Let’s hope it will soon push the envelope to provide a protective cordon for those who can’t protect themselves.

Too bad so many unions representing health-care workers reflexively rush to the defence of their dues-paying members without considering their duty of care. Dues over duties; do as I please versus do no harm.

For years, nurses’ unions across Canada have resisted and litigated against hospitals that demanded flu shots or required masks during flu season to protect patients (a union lawyer argued with a straight face that masks could stigmatize nurses). Elderly patients who might be immunocompromised or otherwise unable to be vaccinated should be able to enter a nursing home or hospital for life-saving treatment without fear of dying from a flu virus or COVID-19 infection transmitted by a defiant nurse who thinks they know best.

Canadians like to think medicare gives them a leg up on America’s private health-care free-for-all, but major U.S. hospitals are now leading the way — by putting patients in the forefront, and putting staff on notice that vaccination is a job requirement. Even in the land of anti-maskers, a Texas court sided this month with the Houston Methodist Hospital Network after it fired anti-vaxxers.

American health-care facilities are leaving us far behind. We like to boast about our universal health care here, but it will soon be full of holes if our health-care workers continue to refuse the needles they need, and that we all deserve.

The right to secure employment is not absolute if it comes into conflict with workplace safety and patient rights. A health-care worker who doesn’t believe in vaccines, or the primacy of patient safety, is in the wrong line of work.

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Ontario will now collate the data, and then educate the doubters, but it cannot be the last step. What if long-term-care workers go through their mandatory education only to reject obligatory vaccination — what then?

Good question. We need to arrive at the ineluctable answer sooner rather than later, for we are rapidly approaching an inflection point on injections.

In this tension between competing rights — the right to treatment versus the right of transmission — is it so hard to see right from wrong?