Why NHS staff are shunning the vaccines [09/12/24]

NHS staff are boycotting covid and flu vaccinations while the government is busy promoting them to the public in a television and radio campaign. Concerned by the low uptake in the health service, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has appealed to healthcare practitioners to get jabbed. This season, only 14 per cent of NHS workers took covid jabs and only a quarter received flu vaccines.

The NHS say this is because hospital staff are busy and have no time. Official figures tell a different story as NHS staff are taking double the days off sick post-covid vaccine rollout than they have since 2009. Unusually, in 2020, absences rocketed in the summer months; absence is traditionally low between May and November. Covid vaccines were offered to front-line staff from December 2020, a sharp rise in absences began in March 2021, three months into the rollout, when seasonal illness is traditionally waning.

Sick days have doubled from the baseline of 3.75 per cent to 6.75 per cent, the highest since 2009, and have not dropped back to 2019 numbers which were between 4.5 per cent and 4.75 per cent. Even during peak pandemic months, absences ranged between 4.75 per cent in February 2020 to 6.10 per cent in May 2020.

One NHS doctor, who did not want to be named, said adverse reactions in staff and patients are contributing to ‘vaccine hesitance’. She said: ‘We have all noticed the adverse effects in our patients. Many of us have become vaccine hesitant after seeing the debilitating health issues our patients are now dealing with, and those we are dealing with ourselves. No health professional that I have spoken to wants any more boosters.

‘The type of reactions we see range from local allergic reactions to a whole switch-on of histamine systems, such as POTS and MCAS.’

Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), characterised by dizziness, is a blood circulation disorder which causes an abnormal increase in heart rate when standing up, while mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) causes allergy symptoms in multiple systems.

Officially, the government recommends the covid jab to care-home residents, all adults 65 and over, babies from six months and adults up to 64 in clinical risk groups. Flu vaccination is recommended to all ages including babies from six months.

The ads fail to define these cohorts and feature the elderly, pregnant women, men, and children under 12 despite official figures showing that covid and flu pose minimal risks to them. Deaths are likely to occur in children and teenagers only if they have co-morbidities. The graph below is from the official Green Book, which provides the latest vaccination information to healthcare staff, and shows there have been just nine covid deaths in the six-month-to-19-year-old age ranges, and deaths only escalate in the over-60s.

Every death is a tragedy, but a death caused by vaccinating a healthy individual is doubly so. Our drugs watchdog, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), says 90 per cent of adverse reactions go unreported, but even so, is busy recording stark, serious adverse event (SAE) figures. By the beginning of June this year, healthcare professionals and the public had reported nearly 3,000 deaths (2,707) related to covid vaccination since December 2020. Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, Novavax and unknown brands of mono and bivalent covid vaccines have been available in the UK.

MHRA summaries are culled from Yellow Card reports, last issued in the week ending June 2, 2024. Overall, 1 in 111 people injected experienced a Yellow Card adverse event (assuming one person submits only one report) while 1 in 148 people injected experienced an adverse event classified as serious; 1 in 180 reports were associated with a fatality.

Over 1.5million adverse events had been reported (1,586,411) by then, involving half a million people (486,634); 75 per cent of reactions were considered serious. The MHRA defines serious as ‘life-threatening, prolonged hospitalisation, persistent or significant disability or incapacity, or congenital abnormality or birth defect’.

Although the AstraZeneca vaccine has been unavailable since August 2022, it accounts for the highest number of total reactions at 885,374, compared with Pfizer’s mono and bivalent jabs, 533,038.

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