Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑Wed Feb 02, 2022 10:02 am
The NHS sacking antivaxers is like schools sacking illiterate teachers, or the Space Agency sacking flat-Earthers. It's a single question fitness to practice hearing: do you understand numbers, like, at all?
Except that the entire teaching system probably only has one or two functionally illiterate people, and the Space Agency only has a couple of flat-earthers. It's like the old joke about if you owe the bank £50,000 you have a problem, but if you owe them £500,000,000 then the bank has a problem.
A political decision has been made here and I don't envy the people who had to make it. On the one hand it is ostensibly anti-science, but there is also the effect on patient care of not having 10% of your already insufficient and Covid-decimated workforce available.
There is also the fact, which the public knows by now, that being vaccinated does not seem to reduce infection and transmission by anything like what we had all hoped. Everyone knows someone who is triple-jabbed who has had Covid and passed it on to their kids or vice versa. So the politicians calculate that people will not object to this as much as they might have done with, say, 95% efficacy against transmission (and perhaps less against severe illness).
People are starting to vote with their feet. The majority feeling has gone from "OMG, I definitely don't want to get this", which ran from March 2020 until the autumn of 2021, to "We're all going to get it, Omicron and boosters mean I probably won't die or get seriously ill, time to get on with life". Personally I'm still a bit more conservative than that (still wearing a mask out of doors, still nervous about indoor dining), but I'm aware that that is no longer the majority position. Certainly I'm aware that I'm not especially concerned about the vaccination status of anyone I interact with.