The Health Minister has said there are no plans to introduce mandatory vaccines for health workers.

It comes amid reports of nursing homes organising raffles and cash prizes to encourage unwilling staff to get vaccinated.

Meanwhile, the Justice Minister has said Government will consider banning healthcare staff that refuse the jab from working on the front line.

On The Hard Shoulder this evening, Health Minister Stephen Donnelly said there are currently no plans to crack down on vaccine-wary health workers.

“The first thing to say on this is that the uptake from healthcare workers has been phenomenal,” he said. “The uptake rates are very, very high.

“There is no planning right now to make vaccines mandatory.”

He said things could change if large numbers of health staff start refusing the vaccine but insisted that it has not yet been a problem.

“There has been very, very high uptake and actually the problem we have had is we haven’t had the supplies available to us to roll it out as quickly as our frontline healthcare workers are looking for it,” he said.

“If we do get to a point where there are settings where a lot of the healthcare workers maybe have not been vaccinated, we can certainly look at the appropriate settings they could be working in, for example.

“But to be honest, right now that is not the issue. The issue we have is, as soon as we get these vaccines into the country our healthcare workers are looking to get them.”

The Taoiseach, Micheál Martin at Government Buildings, 30-12-2020. Image: Julien Behal

He was speaking after the Taoiseach Micheál Martin warned that a ‘high level of restrictions’ will remain in place at least until early April.

Just days earlier however, the Tánaiste Leo Varadkar said golf, non-contact training for team sports and outdoor retail could return at the beginning of March.

Restriction fatigue

Minister Donnelly said the Taoiseach’s warning was “partly” to ensure people do not start easing up on public health guidelines in expectation of restrictions being lifted.

“I think that is something we have to be very cognisant of,” he said. “We really need as a nation to stick with the Level Five measures.

“Certainly, if you look at previous lockdowns we have had, where we have gone to Level Five, if you look at the mobility data coming to the end of those periods, what you did see before the measures were lifted was people beginning to travel more, beginning to interact more and inevitably that leading to more social interaction – which is the opportunity the virus needs to replicate itself and spread.”

Close contacts

He warned that the number of close contacts among confirmed cases has been creeping up in recent weeks – and stood at 2.3 per patient last week.

He said it is hard to know what is driving the increase but admitted restriction fatigue, “would make a lot of sense.”

“People are tired,” he said. “People are at their wits end with this awful virus but the information we have shows that people really are still sticking with it.

“There is not that much of a difference between 2.1 and 2.3 but if we saw that continuing to rise certainly that would be something of a concern.”

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