Delay on making Covid-19 jabs a must for care staff

National cabinet has stopped short of making Covid-19 vaccinations mandatory for aged and disability care workers, instead agreeing on an ‘in-principle disposition’ to move towards the idea.

Chief medical officer Paul Kelly in Canberra on Friday. Picture: Martin Ollman

National cabinet has stopped short of making Covid-19 vaccinations mandatory for aged and disability care workers, instead agreeing on an “in-principle disposition” to move towards the idea.

But nursing homes must ­report from June 15 how many workers have received the jab as the federal government looks to draw a line under a damaging political week in which it was forced to admit it didn’t know how many carers had been vaccinated.

Scott Morrison on Friday said the commonwealth and states had asked the nation’s top medical expert panel to advise how a mandatory program for aged and disability care worker vaccination could be implemented, and to recommend a time frame.

The Prime Minister said he wanted it to happen and would be pushing the states and territories to make appropriate orders as soon as the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee advised it could be safely done.

“We are leaning heavily into this as a government and myself as Prime Minister to see a move towards mandatory vaccination for aged-care workers,” he said.

“I was very firmly of this view, and supported strongly by states and territories, that we need to look at how we can do this safely.”

The AHPPC earlier this year recommended against mandatory vaccines for aged-care workers, and took the same advice to national cabinet on Friday.

Chief medical officer Paul Kelly noted that Friday’s national cabinet communique asked the AHPPC to “continue to monitor the situation and provide advice to national cabinet including on any evidence supporting a future move to mandatory vaccination”.

Professor Kelly said the AHPPC had to weigh up ­“unintended consequences” of mandatory vaccination, including concerns aged-care workers could flee the sector if forced to vaccinate.

A recent example in Western Australia, where a public health order made it mandatory for ­security guards to be vaccinated led to some leaving the industry, he said. He said there was also an issue around explaining the vaccine to people from culturally ­diverse backgrounds.

Aged Care Minister Greg Hunt said he would make it mandatory for nursing homes to report all worker vaccinations from June 15.

“We have asked all facilities to step forward and it will be mandatory for them where an aged-care worker has been vaccinated outside the facility to provide the ­information so we have full accounting of every facility and every aged-care worker,” Mr Hunt said.

Debate over mandatory ­vaccination reignited this week when two elderly residents contracted Covid-19 after contact with an infected care worker in Melbourne.