B.C. scrapping requirement for health-care workers in all sectors to be vaccinated

British Columbia is scrapping a planned requirement for health-care professionals in all sectors to be vaccinated in order to practice.

The move will not eliminate the vaccine requirement for staff in acute or long-term care, nor will it guarantee all workers in other sectors don’t need to be vaccinated.

Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry made the announcement Thursday, as she unveiled sweeping changes to COVID-19 restrictions that will also see the province’s indoor mask mandate and vaccine passport program repealed.

Under the original order, all B.C. family doctors, dentists, chiropractors, physiotherapists and pharmacists would have been required to be vaccinated by March 24, 2022.

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Henry said the new plan will be to work with individual health-care colleges to develop more nuanced regulations based on the risks in specific settings.

“What we’ve done is taken a look at the multiple different colleges on different regulated health professionals and we’re taking a more nuanced, risk-based approach,” Henry said.

“For some, that will mean you need to be vaccinated to practice in certain settings, but we’re doing that on a more tailored basis for each of the regulated health professions, and in a step-wise way.”

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Henry said colleges will still have the power to confidentially collect workers’ vaccination status, and that in some cases that information may be provided to patients so they can make informed decisions.

“For others, there may be additional measures that we need in place,” Henry added.

“This is different from our original vision, which would be people not being able to practice if they were not vaccinated by March 24.”

Like the move to relax other restrictions, Henry said the decision was guided by a high and growing level of immunity to COVID-19 in the province, as well as the approval of the Novavax vaccine.

Novavax is a “traditional” protein-based vaccine, thought to potentially appeal to people uncomfortable with the idea of newer mRNA vaccine technology. The province has yet to receive any, however, and Henry said it may not arrive in B.C. until the end of March.

The requirement for all health-care practitioners to be vaccinated has been questioned by some critics, who argued it would reduce the available number of workers in the province’s already strained health-care system.

In November, more than 3,300 nurses, care aids, doctors and paramedics were placed on unpaid leave for being unvaccinated under the order’s original formulation.