Health secretary Sajid Javid has announced the government’s U-turn on mandatory vaccines for NHS health and social care workers.
He had been facing pressure to scrap the requirement for health workers in England to be double-vaccinated by 1 April amid fears it will lead to a major staffing crisis.
In the Commons, he told MPs that Britain has passed the peak of the winter spike in Covid cases and that the Omicron variant is “intrinsically less severe” than previous strains.
He added: “When taken together with the first factor that we now have greater population protection, the evidence shows that the risk of presentation to emergency care or hospital admission with Omicron is approximately half of that for Delta.
“Given these dramatic changes, it is not only right but responsible to revisit the balance of risks and opportunities that guided our original decision last year.
“While vaccination remains our very best line of defence against Covid-19, I believe that it is no longer proportionate to require vaccination as a condition of deployment through statute.”
Around 77,000 healthcare workers have yet to receive a single Covid vaccine dose, according to the NHS.
However, sources and experts claim this figure includes vaccinated staff whose status has been incorrectly recorded in the national database.
