Dr. Steve James, the NHS consultant anaesthetist who surprised UK Health minister Sajid Javid with an unscripted but very reasoned response to the minister’s question about staff taking the vaccine, has said that he will not be forced into taking the vaccine even if he loses his job on account of it.
In a sit down interview with Unherd he said that he thinks 10% of NHS staff feel the same way as he does.
With the UK Health Secretary threatening that unvaccinated employees will lose their job if they don’t get a covid vaccine by April 1st, what will this mean for the NHS?
Dr. says that he will walk away if it comes to coercion to go against his own beliefs and he thinks that 10% of the NHS staff will be lost through this policy.
From this perspective the policy looks extraordinarily reckless and could cause immense strain on the health service. Ironically it could bring about the overwhelming of the health service that seemed such an urgent concern over the past year. “Protect the NHS” is the last thing that is served by this bullyboy tactic.
The chances are that the coercive threat of losing your job will achieve some compliance from junior doctors who may be in debt and need the financial certainty. It might coerce some nurses who are similarly living from paycheck to paycheck, but that leaves two massive issues which any reasonable manager would have considered.
Firstly, how will this affect senior staff? The most qualified and irreplaceable staff; the senior consultant, the senior surgeon, the senior nurse manager; have far less financial incentive to go along with a coercive policy they profoundly disagree with. Would a surgeon or oncologist in his or her 60’s stay on if it’s under this type of duress? He or she probably doesn’t need the money.
Having listened to Dr. Peter McCullough on the Joe Rogan Experience, one of the things that stood out was how enormously experienced, authoritative and knowledge he was, yet he and others are being defenestrated. Yet it is precisely the disagreeableness (a psychological term meaning unwillingness to compromise on the truth) of experts that often makes them such an asset to society and to knowledge. Is a purge of minds like this really going to “protect the NHS”?
Dr. James said that he couldn’t enact his vocation as a doctor and give patient centred guidance and advice, if he had compromised his own medical values concerning his own health. As he explained his moral reasoning, this seemed like a rational analysis and a reasonable (if difficult) reason to quit his job if the push came to shove.
This is not the rationale of an unhinged nut, it is the position of someone steadfast to his own moral compass, and if he is indicative of the position of aforementioned 10%, there might be a significant purge of the NHS on April 1.
There are organisations forming to fight vaccine mandates, such as NHS100K who gives voice to all these NHS staff who feel like Dr. James. They suggest that the coercive policy will drive qualified staff out of the service.
The second issue – a massive judgement error – is that even if the policy succeeds in bullying people to get the vaccine against their strongly held beliefs, it may have a detrimental effect on the morale of the staff. It seems likely that morale will wither and people will be tempted to just clock in and slack off. A work force who lacks morale and enthusiasm is a sick service. This is frequently a symptom of struggling and failing companies in the private sector. This policy looks like self-immolation.
But supposing they do fire staff on April 1st, doesn’t that leave a chronically understaffed service? Who will fill in the vacancies, or will the NHS, confounding all the paranoid efforts of the covid maniacs, collapse?
Here is a cautionary tale from another jurisdiction. A New York hospital – in Lewis County – forced unvaccinated nurses out and then had to close their maternity ward because of the ensuing shortages.
So let’s get this straight. To save lives from the dreaded virus, they closed down the maternity ward. I guess that was to prevent people getting born and then dying? Was that part of the plan?
Even Kafka couldn’t have invented anything so absurd. The old adage of curing a headache by cutting off the head must seem reasonable all of a sudden to the covidtarians.
Here’s the thing. We all know that vaccination doesn’t stop transmission on Omicron, and that my vaccination doesn’t ensure your safety. This straw clutching at safetyism is a severe and myopic problem which we have frequently discussed on Gript, but I digress.
So why does this deceit over the vaccines effectiveness persist? It is an untruth and yet the managerial class insists on trying to force us to believe it.
They are finding that it is impossible to fool all of the people all of the time and harder still to achieve 100% compliance through bullying; and yet they persist.
This is becoming a society ruled by dysfunction – the bullying, the threats, the lies, the obfuscation, the reticence on the truth such as the true covid hospitalisation numbers – and that is our greatest problem. This dysfunction stemming from a managerial therapeutic bureaucracy is a problem which will haunt us for decades if it is not addressed.