Healthcare workers must be vaccinated against Corona by mid-March.
(Photo: dpa)
There are good reasons for compulsory vaccination – especially for employees in the healthcare sector. After all, patients cannot choose their carers and nurses. Those who are weak or old are put at further risk by unvaccinated personnel. The institution-related vaccination requirement, which will apply from March 15th in medical practices, clinics or nursing homes, is intended to solve precisely these problems.
But in its current form, the law creates more problems than solutions. It starts with the selected professional groups. Why are clinic staff required to be immunized, but not teachers? They also work closely with people on a daily basis. This promotes social division and gives doubting clinic staff anything but an incentive to vaccinate.
The biggest problem: implementation. Unvaccinated healthcare workers cannot simply be fired in mid-March. The local health department must first issue an entry ban after an individual check. So those authorities in particular who are already overwhelmed with contact tracing at an incidence of 20 should now also check Germany’s clinic staff when there are record infection numbers?
In practice, this complicates the creation of rosters because operators do not know how long they can continue to employ their unvaccinated employees. Decided in mid-December, at the beginning of February not all details of the vaccination requirement were clarified. It is unclear whether craftsmen or hairdressers who work in health facilities also have to be vaccinated.
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And then the obligation to vaccinate exacerbates the already tense personnel situation. In nursing alone, there is already a shortage of 200,000 employees. A Handelsblatt survey shows that the first clinics and nursing homes are reporting layoffs in connection with compulsory vaccination. According to this, in some regions less than 70 percent of employees are vaccinated.
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In view of the impending job loss, one or the other doubting nurse will still be immunized, especially when the inactivated vaccine comes from Novavax. But in the end, there will be gaps in hospitals and nursing homes that can no longer be closed, and which everyone will feel painfully in the end.
Politicians could prevent this by introducing a general obligation to vaccinate. There may also be implementation problems, but the shortage of staff would not worsen in the health sector – after all, the unvaccinated staff would no longer find a job in any other industry.
The government should postpone the obligation to vaccinate in the healthcare system, reconsider it – and then introduce orderly rules for everyone.
More: Industry hesitates about compulsory vaccination and sees problems with enforcement