@caringcarer
I am awake. Without vaccines death figures would have been souch higher.
Indeed yes. But if the purpose of mandatory vaccination is to reduce deaths, then the people who should be targetted are the elderly and the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable, who are most likely to die.
Whilst some NHS workers fall into that category, most do not. Many are young, healthy, and at relatively low personal risk of serious illness with covid. I still think they'd be better off vaccinated (I'm enthusiastically triple jabbed) but if the argument is we're mandating vaccination for individual protection, reducing mortality, and cutting the burden on the NHS, then we're targetting the wrong groups.
If we want it to protect patients, that's a different argument. If the vaccine gave sterilising immunity, it would be a robust one. But, certainly against Omicron, it doesn't.
So the policy seems to be there mostly because politicians think it will be popular. And, now public opinion has shifted, it looks like the policy is shifting to match.