Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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I have two things to say about that. It has never been a requirement for people to be vaccinated when they go to work. Throughout the pandemic, we have had teachers in front of the classroom, retail workers in shops where the customers are mostly not vaccinated, transport workers driving buses and healthcare workers going into relatively risky scenarios before they were vaccinated so it has never been the case that we said that being vaccinated was a requirement to work or that people should not go back to work if they are not vaccinated so I do not anticipate us changing that now. We asked NPHET about this point when we met it as part of the Covid sub-committee. The medical, scientific and public health advice from NPHET is that this will be a low risk as is the case with workers in hotels at the moment. They would be wearing masks and there would be PPE. In addition, because under this proposed scenario all of the customers would be fully vaccinated or immune, it would be a low risk relative to other workplaces where customers may not be vaccinated or may not be immune.