Patrick Carlyon: Every essential worker should be compelled to get Covid jab

Anything that brings an end to lockdowns – be it mandatory jabs of essential workers and no vax/no school policies – must be grasped soon rather than later.

Something’s gotta give.

Melbourne’s 200 days of lockdown have been wrapped in 572 days of uncertainty, starting with the first Covid case in Melbourne last year.

Remission seems more removed than ever. “When will it end?” has become “Will it ever end?”.

It’s easy to blame the plight on idiots who attend engagement parties or pursue social interactions in defiance of the rules. Anger, at least, is more constructive than despair.

Yet the bigger story of lockdowns is trickier to decipher.

Sydney’s Covid crisis features people who do the wrong thing and spread the virus. But the numbers there are also propelled by people who are, ostensibly, doing the right thing.

They are essential workers who mix in the course of work, in warehouses or stations or supermarkets or medical facilities. They are driving case spikes unseen in Australia.

We have unprecedented controls in Victoria, such as a curfew and a ban on playgrounds. The rage of earlier reactions to perceived overreach has dimmed to resignation. After 572 days, democratic norms seem long lost.

The idea of forcing people, under threat of sacking, to receive a medical procedure they do not want would once have conjured talk of dystopian oppression.

A man receives a dose of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.

Civil libertarians share a distrust of mandatory vaccinations, along with the shrill right. But the greater good now suffers for such niceties, enshrined as they long were.

Those people who leave home to work during lockdown, or harsh restrictions, are the engine that drives the pilot light of society. We need them.

But they are also extending the inexorable sameness.

It isn’t their fault that they catch and spread disease.

But they are a problem. That’s why they ought to be compelled to be vaccinated, or restrained from the everyday course of their work.

Supermarket workers should have to be vaccinated, along with teachers, police officers, health workers, even journalists who carry the “essential” tag.

Throw in truck drivers and tram drivers. Takeaway food staff and Uber drivers. Construction workers and removalists. Kids, too, must be vaccinated in the coming months, given the high numbers of positive cases who are minors.

Qantas is the latest employer to impose such prescriptiveness. Chief executive Alan Joyce had an easier time of the announcement this week than the chair of SPC, Hussein Rifai, whose same directive to his workers two weeks ago was received with gasps.

“(W)e’re being clear that for the safety of the workplace, for the safety of our customers and for the safety of communities (where we fly), we will be making it a requirement for our people,” Joyce said.

Such bosses are ahead of the curve. They have helped tip the mood, which has hardened – and dipped – in the collective inability to plan a holiday, go to Bunnings, or cop another day at home with the damned dogs.

They are looking past the daily crises and plotting a better future. They promote certainty. They deserve to be supported by federal government laws that encompass all essential industries.

In Victoria, jabs remain optional for public servants and frontline healthcare workers, though take-up rates in health are high.

This policy may change, based on the comments of Health Minister Martin Foley on Thursday. It has to, ultimately. And because it has to, sooner is better than later.

Those people who leave home to work during lockdown, or harsh restrictions, are the engine that drives the pilot light of society.

In aged care, more than two in five workers across the nation remain unvaccinated.

The fact of this, after the clutter of horror stories of St Basil’s nursing home at a coronial inquiry on Wednesday – invites open-mouthed disbelief.

The unvaccinated in aged care number more than that of an MCG grand final crowd, pre-Covid. They have a few more weeks yet to be vaccinated. Until they are, they are Covid hand grenades.

Realities matter more than abstractions. The right to individual free choice bows to the greater need.

For there is no end in sight. Two hundred days of lockdown could grow to 250.

Lauded vaccination targets of 70 or 80 per cent will certainly herald a new phase. But think the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end.

Covid cannot be eliminated, and probably never will be. The hope is that it may fade, as opposed to evolving into something even more sinister.

A final destination is something to hold on to. All pandemics die out, eventually, even without vaccination programs.

But the price of getting there exacts its own toll. We have been disarmed of one of the best coping mechanisms – to plan ahead. The prospect of tomorrow, any tomorrow, needs to be brightened.

Anything that accelerates that journey – be it mandatory vaccinations of essential workers and no jab/no school policies – must be grasped before an entire nation shrinks.

Call it a rollout in hope.

Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist