Healthcare Workers, Students & Hospital Workers Facing Mandatory Vaccine Policies

August 2017 – In this section, we provide you with information on the dilemma posed by mandatory vaccination policies to Healthcare Workers, Hospital Workers and Students. Your right to informed consent is discussed on our Negotiating Vaccine Exemptions page. As well, we provide a multi-page section on the Science Supporting Vaccine Risk.
We created this section partly because of the ongoing battle between the BC Ministry of Health and several unions which represent the tens of thousands of healthcare workers (HCWs) in that province. (Similar battles have been simmering or have come to a boil across Canada and in USA. In 2002, an Ontario court granted hospital workers freedom to choose vaccination or not.) In 2015, Ontario nurses who refuse influenza vaccination won the right to reject wearing masks for the duration of the flu season.
Vaccine Choice Canada fully supports the BC workers’ position rejecting their governments’ arbitrary decision to introduce new regulations requiring that HCWs accept and declare their acceptance of influenza vaccination or wear face masks during the entire influenza season. Furthermore, we fully support exemptions for college students. We submit that Healthcare workers and students entering post secondary education, like all other Canadians, have the right to accurate information about vaccines. As citizens of this country, they have a right to exercise voluntary, informed consent to vaccination and not be subjected to harassment, coercion, intimidation or threats of job loss or exclusion from school entry for refusing vaccination. Flexible medical, religious and conscientious belief exemptions to any vaccine recommendations must be equally available to everyone.
Our Science section provides quick access to abstracts and full texts of peer reviewed studies, and authoritative articles showing that vaccines can cause serious injury and even death. It includes an introduction and twelve categories of vaccine risk with hyperlinks between pages where related studies are listed. The introduction notes that, although there may be a much larger volume of studies which purport to show no vaccine risk, frequently, conflicts of interest cast doubt on their conclusions.
***Update December 2019 – B.C. nurses no longer required to get flu vaccine or wear mask – Union says new agreement will end ‘punitive nature’ of previous policy