Aged-care Covid-19 vaccine is a no-brainer

The national cabinet should on Friday take the decision to make it compulsory for all aged-care workers to be vaccinated for Covid-19 as a condition for them to turn up for work.

The senior Australians they look after deserve no less, given how vulnerable they are to the virus. And if a worker doesn’t want to get the jab, they should choose another form of work.

This might seem tough on the individual rights of workers, but there is also the right of a resident to be safe in their own home.

So far, the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee – the medical expert panel advising governments on Covid – has not recommended mandatory vaccination for aged-care workers, and the Prime Minister told parliament on Thursday the committee would take the same view to Friday’s national cabinet.

Its argument for not making the vaccine mandatory for aged-care workers sits around giving workers individual choice and ensuring continuity of workforce in aged care. Yet some states make it compulsory for aged-care workers to have a flu vaccination. And aged-care providers are understood to be comfortable with a Covid vaccination being a requirement of employment.

The same should apply nationally for Covid.

All that said, there is no way the Morrison government can blame workers for the mess it finds itself in this week over the shockingly low numbers of care workers who have received the jab under the voluntary system, as well as the insufficient number of nursing home residents themselves who are fully vaccinated.

The political heat has been high, with the issue dominating question time all week.

On the government’s own best estimate, as Health Minister Greg Hunt told parliament on Wednesday, only about 40,000 workers, or 17.3 per cent, have ­received one dose through commonwealth programs, and even fewer are fully vaccinated. For aged-care residents, about 66 per cent have received both jabs.

Remember that nursing home residents and their carers were listed by the Morrison government back in January as Category 1(a) for vaccination – ie, they were the first cabs off the rank.

The Morrison government originally told aged-care workers they would be vaccinated alongside residents at the facilities through an “in-reach” program.

But it didn’t happen. Aged Care Services Minister Richard Colbeck told Senate estimates a “policy pivot” was made to vaccinate residents only. The change, he said, was due to international evidence that vaccinating staff and residents at the same time could be problematic for a facility if workers became ill. And the shift to use only AstraZeneca for over-50s complicated matters.

Aged-care workers’ representatives say they only found out about the pivot this week.

Even the numbers the government is using are ropey. It doesn’t know how many carers have sourced vaccines through GPs or hubs. They have now set up a portal, which will come into use on Friday, to attempt to collate this information.

Surely this should have been in place since January when it was first proposed these workers were first in line for vaccines.

Providers could have been given the job of vaccinating their workers. Or the states could have been asked to do it, alongside ­vaccinating health and hospital workers.

Instead, the federal government decided to take on the service delivery task itself – and the results are now plain to see.