B.C. has ended its COVID-19 public-health emergency, including lifting the vaccine mandate for health care workers. Doctors, nurses, allied health workers and contractors can once again work in the province’s hospitals, care homes and community health centres even if they have not been vaccinated against COVID-19.
The move is understandable. COVID-19 no longer requires special rules; it has shifted from being a pandemic illness to an endemic one.
Of course, that doesn’t mean COVID is no longer a threat. We are seeing a bit of a summer surge; in the most recent week of reporting, we still saw 26 COVID-19 deaths and 92 people hospitalized in Canada (based on data from only four reporting provinces). And the lingering effects of long COVID remain.
But there is zero political interest in talking about COVID-19, and not much enthusiasm among the public either. Like it or not, that’s the reality.
It’s not a public-health emergency anymore, and Dr. Bonnie Henry, B.C.’s provincial health officer, is right to say so. She could have done so months ago, by her own admission.
But let’s not forget that, despite the whinging of a small but loud minority, the COVID-19 vaccine mandate was always sound policy.
The safety of patients should always take precedent over the whims of workers, and B.C. did a much better job of protecting its vulnerable citizens than Ontario or Quebec, which abandoned their provincial mandates shamefully early.
The courts have also backed this view. In May, the B.C. Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit by 15 unvaccinated workers who challenged the mandates. Justice Simon Coval said that while the rules may have violated the constitutional rights of some workers, that was reasonable because the law was designed to protect the rights of vulnerable patients who had no choice but to be treated by these workers.
The interesting news in B.C.’s announcement, however, is that in lieu of a vaccine mandate, the province has announced the creation of a centralized registry of health care workers’ vaccination statuses for eight vaccine-preventable illnesses: influenza, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B, pertussis (whooping cough), varicella (chicken pox) as well as COVID-19.
This information is currently collected in a haphazard manner by individual institutions. A more systemic approach will allow for a better response, for example in the event that there is an outbreak or a specific threat to patients that might call for reassigning or suspending unvaccinated workers. The registry will also leave the province better prepared to respond to a potential new surge in COVID-19 or a new pandemic threat.
The approach – reporting one’s status, rather than being obliged to get vaccinated – aligns with earlier provincial legislation related to schools. In 2019, B.C. adopted regulations that require parents and guardians to report the vaccination status of all students in public schools. (Vaccination for school admission is mandatory only in Ontario and New Brunswick, while other provinces collect information to varying degrees. But as outbreaks of vaccine-preventable illnesses like measles become more common, having data handy is becoming increasingly important.)
B.C.’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, which had been in place since October, 2021, cost a total of 2,692 people their jobs, most of them casual workers. Only 630 full-time workers were dismissed for being unvaccinated, a tiny minority of them doctors and nurses. (B.C. has 190,000 full-time health workers, so that’s one-third of 1 per cent of the work force.)
The notion that vaccine mandates have contributed to the ever-worsening labour shortages in health care, as political critics of the government have argued, is nonsense. Long-standing system failings, including a lack of human-resources planning, are the real reason for our labour woes.
The vast majority of health care workers are ethical, civic-minded and science-believing, and as a result, almost all of them are vaccinated.
The workers who previously lost their jobs are free to reapply. They will still have to register their vaccination status, however, and they may not like that either.
While anti-vaxxers have made the refuseniks who lost their jobs because of mandates out to be martyrs, they are nothing of the sort. Honestly, should people who don’t believe in science be working in health care?
As B.C’s Dr. Henry has said repeatedly over the years: If you don’t believe in the effectiveness of vaccines, perhaps you should consider another career.
Health workers who chose to not be vaccinated against COVID-19 are now free to return to work and follow the new rules, but they don’t automatically deserve their old jobs back or back pay, as some politicians have suggested.
They made a choice. And that choice had consequences.