Why must I have a jab to keep a nursing job I love?

DEAR BEL

I’M SURE you get thousands of pleading letters each day, but please read mine. I’m 33 years old. I read your column every week and always feel in awe of your wisdom and kindness. I’m a mental health nurse, so I take great inspiration in the way you reflect your compassion onto others and I hope my patients would say I do the same.

Now please, Bel, speak out on the unethical mandate that is about to pass within the NHS. So many of us do not wish to be vaccinated. But many members of the public still believe we are selfish, despite Omicron confirming this is not an illness of the unvaccinated.

It is unfair to think of us this way. We have been holding the NHS up for the past two years. I have worked relentlessly for 14 years caring for the seriously mentally unwell. Having already had Covid, I do not need three Covid vaccines to be safe to do my job. There is no reasonable, scientific, ethical or logical reason to be forcing this upon NHS staff.

At one point, many believed transmission was an issue of the unvaccinated. We now know this is untrue.

I’m beginning to feel that ‘Because I’ve had the jabs, you should have them’ has become the reason to force this on others. Please use your compassionate words, Bel, to steer people in the right direction.

We are already so understaffed. NHS staff are prepared to leave in their thousands. They will not sacrifice their bodily rights for any career. Nor would anyone else. Please help us!

JEN

All your very kind comments to me are left in here (I usually edit such compliments out, for obvious reasons) because my honest response to your email will certainly be disappointing — and that’s a great pity.

I fear you will find me lacking in the very ‘compassion’ you praise — but what can I do?

The person writing this column (which occupies my mind a great deal of the time) is a human being with her own strong views and feelings.

Otherwise, I couldn’t do the job. Your heartfelt letter reveals one of the good, sincere, hardworking individuals (many in the NHS, many not) without whom this society would founder. I must — and do — respect what you write and can easily imagine the affection you have won from those you have helped.

It’s painful to read through the lines of your email and realise how this is affecting you. Yet I, too, have equally sincere views about vaccination — so find myself at odds with yours.

When I was a child growing up in liverpool in the 1950s it was commonplace to see children with legs in irons because they had contracted polio.

They were viewed with universal pity and, of course, our parents were terrified that as vulnerable children we would catch poliomyelitis.

So when the polio vaccine programme began in 1957 (when I was 11) I’ve no doubt that the vast majority of parents were grateful.

I remember getting the jab — and us all feeling rather excited. Did people complain that it was too much of ‘an unknown’? Probably.

What I do know is that the disease has been almost completely wiped out across the globe. There were only 33 reported cases in 2018, representing a 99 per cent drop over 30 years.

Tetanus, measles, influenza,

hepatitis A and B, rubella, whooping cough, mumps, chickenpox, diphtheria... you are a nurse and I am not, but we both know the nation’s health has been immeasurably improved over the years by vaccines of many types.

Each year I am glad to get my flu jab. In this age of travel, people accepted that certain countries required vaccines against Yellow Fever — to name but one. Did they ask what was in the magic potion going into their arms? No.

So why all the fuss about the vaccine against Covid? I simply do not understand.

During 2020, my friends and family pinned our hopes on a vaccine. What brilliant news it was when it came. I am proud of this country’s vaccination programme and wholeheartedly praise Boris Johnson for the part he played. I was glad and relieved to have my booster and, if there’s another jab going, I will happily stick out my arm.

Would you call me stupid/deluded/ ill-informed, Jen? I doubt you could possibly read my words over months and make that accusation.

It worries me that the NHS march at the weekend was joined by more than 1,000 anti-vaxxers and activists spouting ludicrous theories, like saying the jabs are part of a global plot to control and/or kill the population.

Never mind anti-jabs, this is the sort of stupid conspiracy chatter, fed by the contagious derangement of social media, that has infected the western world as perniciously as any virus.

As far as I am concerned, such people are as bad as the far-Right groups to which many of them have links.

Let me be clear. I am not talking about you or the NHS colleagues who feel as you do. Nor would I accuse anybody of ‘selfishness’ when they are expressing views they hold dear. What’s more, I am instinctively opposed to coercion, which does leave me somewhat confused, I admit.

But just as this issue distresses you, so it distresses me to realise that good people like you may now even choose to give up their jobs. Why? Because refusing the vaccination which the rest of us have willingly and gratefully received is more important to them than ministering to the sick people they were trained to help.

That is a sad choice, yet I think it a bad one, too. But I have, in fairness, printed your letter because if there are readers who think the same, they can read your words and be glad of a kindred spirit.

You ask me to ‘steer people in the right direction’ — and wrote in good faith clearly expecting me to agree with you. But in equally good faith, I reply that for me the right direction is to be sure you are vaccinated, for your own sake and for the sake of your families, friends and communities.

And also, in your case, for those all-important patients, too. I view the anti-vax marches and the selfconsciously dramatic shedding of uniforms by NHS staff with sadness and disbelief, but also with quite a lot of distaste, too. I’m really sorry, but there it is.