Epidemiologists Catherine Bennett and Nancy Baxter told the state’s pandemic declaration accountability and oversight committee on Thursday that the time for jab mandates in most workplaces had passed.Every Victorian worker – including contractors, volunteers and students on placement – must show evidence to their employer of having two vaccination doses to continue working outside their home.Third dose mandates also remain in some settings, meaning workers in healthcare, disability and aged care, emergency services, education, food distribution and processing must have their booster.Professor Bennett, who is the epidemiology chair at Deakin University, said there was no basis to keep people away from workplaces that only require two jabs.“I don’t think there’s any dispute that they served a role at the time … (but) we’ve moved on from any reasonable argument around two dosed mandates,” Prof Bennett said.Professor Baxter, who leads the University of Melbourne’s school of population and global health, said it was “unclear” why a two-dose edict was still being enforced.“Reducing transmission isn’t the major reason to have vaccine mandates anymore, so it’s unlikely that vaccine mandates are going to result in protection of people in the workplace.“Density restrictions, mandatory mask wearing and recommendations for working at home – we’ve eliminated those (restrictions) that we know will be more effective against transmission, (so) it’s unclear why we’re maintaining mandatory vaccines just for that.“We need to carefully balance the community and personal benefits of vaccination against the pretty heavy-handed nature of vaccine mandates.”Prof Bennett said the settings that require employees to have three doses should continuously be looked at to ensure the rule was proportionate to meet both a duty of care for the worker while also factoring in consideration for the vulnerability of people they are working with.Ambulance Victoria revealed just 25 paramedics and seven office workers had resigned over the mandatory jab.But 230 nurses and midwives – aligned with the Australian Nurses and Midwifery Association – resigned because of the union’s “strong national stance in relation to vaccination”. It’s unclear if the former members – who are still registered – have quit their jobs entirely, the union’s Victorian secretary, Lisa Fitzpatrick, said.Doherty Institute epidemiologist professor Jodie McVernon said the population is “reasonably well served” by current levels of immunity, when asked if it was proportionate for the government to extend the state’s pandemic declaration.“Variants are the wildcard here but our population is largely immune, and on that basis, we’re largely resilient to large surges of severe disease due to Covid,” she said.“That is important in thinking about the proportionality of measures and whether they are considered reasonable and proportionate.”But Prof McVernon spruiked the importance of vaccines as allowing Victoria to avoid the same catastrophic events seen in India, Italy and New York at the height of their Covid crises.Prof McVernon said it shouldn’t be assumed that Victoria, or Australia, was immune from facing international scenes where bodies were being burned, ice rinks converted into morgues and refrigerator trucks backed up to hospitals. “We’re not special,” she said.“Without vaccines to protect us, we were open to all those same explosive events.”Despite 3663 Victorians having died with the virus since the pandemic began, Professor McVernon said “we can’t forget that really we’ve had … a Covid-lite experience”.“We missed that early, really severe disease and death in unvaccinated populations,” she said.But Burnet Institute epidemiologist Margaret Hellard warned Australia was likely to surpass 10,000 Covid related deaths this year.“That is far higher … than the standard deaths we would have had related to flu in any bad year,” she said.
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