Dr. Nick Coatsworth, a former deputy national health officer for Australia, thinks it’s time for businesses to reinstate career opportunities for unvaccinated Australians.
In the pages of the Australian Financial Review, the vociferous opponent of many of the tougher pandemic measures argued that punishing people who had not received the vaccine was now morally questionable, scientifically worthless, and might be legally challenged.
Public health justifications have been eliminated by natural immunity and widespread vaccination.
A worker who enjoys natural immunity could bring a claim for wrongful termination.
There is an open “no jab, no job” policy at some of the top companies in the country, including Coles, Woolworths, Qantas, Virgin Australia, Telstra, the Commonwealth Bank, and SPC.
While the majority of “high risk” settings no longer require the formal jab, many businesses and organizations are nonetheless enforcing “shadow” rules by refusing to hire personnel who have not received the jab.
While initially supporting the mandates to combat “normal human inertia towards being immunized,” Dr. Coatsworth claimed the time had passed.
The time for corporate vaccine requirements has changed, according to him, and the Covid-19 climate has changed.
Zeb Jamrozik, a bioethicist at Monash University, was quoted by the speaker as saying that “there are troubling evidence that present vaccine policies, rather than being science-based, are being driven by socio-political attitudes that foster segregation, stigmatization, and polarization…
The public health justification for requirements, according to Dr. Coatsworth, is no longer more important than ethical considerations.
Due to the Omicron variant’s higher infectiousness, he claimed that it was now widely acknowledged that immunizations “do not prevent transmission.”
The second was that Australians of working age did not require hospital care due to high vaccination rates, which had already had a positive influence on the healthcare system.
In his essay, Dr. Coatsworth stated that “if firms could previously claim that their mandates were an exercise of corporate social responsibility to lessen the burden of sickness.”
Then, he made the case that a worker who contracted Covid and was subsequently dismissed for forgoing the vaccination could be eligible to file a lawsuit because recovering from the illness imparted a natural level of immunity.
In comparison to primary vaccination alone, he noted, “immunity acquired by infection provides at least similar and possibly more long-lasting immunity.”