England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty has told the Covid Inquiry he was “sceptical” about making Covid vaccines mandatory for healthcare workers and admitted that the decision was “100% a political one”
No wonder so many people felt they were being coerced. According to the covid inquiry we are now hearing that Sir Chris Whitty was deeply sceptical about the mandates.
Whitty considered, rightly, that all of us, including health workers, should be left to decide for ourselves what should be injected into our bodies, especially, he now says, since “every drug and vaccine has side effects, and some of those may be rare, but still severe”.
So, the British government chose to ignore the advice of its own Chief Medical Officer, and dismissed away the science, just as it did when it shut down the schools…a decision that caused irreparable long-term harm to some children.
The Telegraph reports: The Chief Medical Officer for England told the Covid Inquiry the decision to implement the mandate was “100 per cent a political one”.
Care home workers were mandated to be vaccinated against Covid-19 from November 2021 and were among the first to be given the jabs during the original rollout.
However, this scheme, known as vaccination as a condition of deployment (VCOD), was controversial. Proposals to widen the scheme to include all healthcare workers were later abandoned and the need for care home staff to be jabbed was lifted in 2022.
Prof Whitty said such a decision was a balance between the risk of having a vulnerable person cared for by someone who may pass on an infection to them and respecting a person’s own autonomy.
“There’s a range of opinions on this and for what it’s worth – but I don’t think it’s worth very much – I’m rather more sceptical than some people that this is a good idea, but that’s a view as a citizen,” Prof Whitty told the inquiry.
He added that as a doctor he had several opinions on why mandatory vaccination had some advocates.
These include that it is already enshrined into law that a person who is a risk to others can not do certain jobs, such as a lorry driver with epilepsy; doctors already have a “medical responsibility” as outlined by the General Medical Council’s guidance for doctors to protect patients from you giving them diseases, which explicitly includes vaccination; and historically some doctors with certain infections would not be able to do certain procedures.
Prof Whitty told the inquiry that the Covid mandatory jab ruling, therefore, was not novel but was still controversial.
“Every drug and vaccine has side effects, and some of those may be rare, but still severe, and that has to be taken into account in the decisions that are taken about mandation,” he added.
“I was sometimes worried that people were just thinking, ‘people should just get vaccinated. What’s the problem?’
“And my view is that this is a medical procedure, and, more importantly, there will be side effects and they may well be rare around serious and that is an important part of the balance of risk.”
Prof Whitty added that mandatory vaccination “has not got a very happy history” and pointed to the example of compulsory smallpox vaccination of children in 19th-century England, which led to a decline in vaccine uptake and the world’s first “anti-vax” movement.
Prof Whitty said: “Smallpox is an example, and, in my view, what happened after mandation [of the coronavirus vaccine] in the social care system in England, I think probably will be added to that catalogue.