N.B. health minister won't reaffirm vaccine mandate for health-care workers

FREDERICTON -

New Brunswick Health Minister Dorothy Shephard said on Thursday that she had been reviewing Quebec and Ontario's decisions requiring health care workers to be vaccinated.

"I believe that the 90 per cent with their vaccinations want to co-work with people who are also vaccinated," Shephard said. "So, at this time I cannot give you an answer. We are still evaluating, we're still looking at what particular options we have to encourage those who are not vaccinated to get vaccinated, but the safest environment for employees to work in with patients in hospitals for everyone who works in our hospital systems is for everyone to be vaccinated."

Last month, the New Brunswick government mandated that all public workers had to be vaccinated by Nov. 19.

"I cannot tell you how many letters I have been receiving from stakeholders asking us to not backtrack, and I want to tell you that we don't want to backtrack because we know that the safest environment for our patients and our health-care professionals is to have vaccinated employees doing their jobs," Shephard said.

While doctors are 99 per cent vaccinated, according to the New Brunswick Medical Society, other areas of health care are not seeing such high vaccination rates.

"Right now we have almost 99 per cent of the physician population in the province vaccinated and the majority of those are fully vaccinated," said Dr. Mark MacMillan, president of the medical society.

MacMillan said it's often in health-care institutions outside a hospital setting where employees are less likely to be vaccinated.

"Well the issue here is COVID-19 getting into our institutions, hospitals, special care homes, as well as nursing care homes, we're taking care of the sickest patients in the province and we have to protect we have to protect ourselves from having COVID-19 infiltrate these institutions," MacMillan said.

The New Brunswick Association of Nursing Homes (NBANH) says that 95.6 per cent of employees have at least one dose, 90.2 per cent have two doses, 26 staff have left their employment, 0.1 per cent have medical exemptions and 4.4 per cent are still refusing any vaccination.

"As it stands right now, we could have upward of 300 people who will be sent home from work without pay if they do not begin the vaccination process," said Michael Keating, the NBANH interim executive director.

Keating said the board made the decision for nursing home employees to be required  to be vaccinated whether government backtracks on the mandate or not.

"Most homes will be affected by two or three staff not coming in which is not too unusual given the attrition rates that we see," Keating said. "The board had to make a decision between residents' safety and accommodation for employees' beliefs."

Shephard says the last count was about 1,200 workers will be sent home without pay if they are not vaccinated by Nov. 19.