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The government must lift employers’ restrictions requiring workers to be vaccinated, or risk thousands of lives. The delta variant has made landfall.
This variant of the covid19 virus has made a mockery of the concept of “herd immunity” (where the unvaccinated are protected by an immune population) everywhere it has hit.
On Monday, the head of the Israeli Health Ministry’s advisory committee for infectious diseases bluntly said: “The (real) question is whether the infected person is vaccinated or not.
"It’s unavoidable that the pandemic will infect the majority of the population.
"It won’t disappear in another half a year.”
This, by the way, is in a country which has vaccinated almost 67 per cent of its population.
Yale Medical School reckons that delta is two and a quarter times more infectious than the original virus. While vaccines, including AstraZeneca and Sinopharm, remain effective at protecting people from hospitalisation with the new variant, with delta they are just 50 per cent effective at preventing you from getting the virus, says the University of East Anglia.
Delta has moved the goalposts. It is now quite simply a race to vaccinate as much of the population as possible.
To protect everyone from the virus, it is not enough to vaccinate 70 per cent; we need to vaccinate the entire population. This is not only to protect the unvaccinated, but to prevent spread amongst the vaccinated that could result in the deaths of people with comorbidities or pre-existing conditions (albeit at a lower rate than for the unvaccinated).
With the latest announcement of donations from the US, we have enough vaccines to rapidly ramp up vaccinations. The chambers of commerce and others have rallied with cash and support to roll out centres across the country.
The trouble now is to get jabs in arms and move the hesitant.
Of course, we need a more effective messaging campaign (or indeed a campaign at all), which I and the medical community have repeatedly called for. But any campaign will be blunted when employers are actively being prevented from keeping their employees and customers safe.
The most effective way to improve vaccine take-up right now is to allow employers to require employees to be vaccinated. I guarantee that the minute this is announced, every single employer in the country will mandate vaccinations for their employees.
Employers can and should make every possible effort to share health information and engage with their teams with empathy. Sending an employee home should always be a last resort. But the stakes are too high. The delta variant has meant that we don’t have the luxury of lengthy debate.
Unvaccinated employees are a risk to their colleagues and their families. That’s why employers should quite rightly be allowed to respect the rights of their vaccinated employees and their customers to a safe environment.
People are incredibly anxious to reopen their businesses. So are most employees, especially those in the hardest-hit food, retail and entertain
