Workplace jab policy agreed

Nedlac decides on Covid vaccine protocols for workers

Business, labour and the government have reached agreement at Nedlac on workplace Covid vaccine guidelines that will ensure workers are encouraged to be vaccinated, and are given paid time off to do so, but cannot be dismissed for declining the jab.

This comes as the vaccine rollout picks up pace at public and private sector sites, with the daily total reaching 60,000 on Thursday — though supply constraints are expected to slow the pace temporarily next week. Business for SA (B4SA) said on Friday that about 110 private and 210 public sites planned to be online this week. About 348,000 people have received their first shot.

Some of SA’s largest employers are looking to ramp up the numbers by opening an initial 89 workplace sites that could vaccinate 24,300 people a day.

“We know that there needs to be sufficient capacity at maximum throughput levels, and by mid-July we need to be vaccinating more than 200,000 people a day as a country,” said Lungi Nyathi, managing executive for clinical risk and advisory at Medscheme, who is B4SA’s lead on workplace vaccines.

“To be able to do that we need everybody to come on board so that hospitals, GPs and pharmacies can see sick patients and not just vaccinate … workplace sites will be an important part of that.”

There are already two workplace sites up and running, one in the auto industry and the other at Impala Platinum, with further sites registered or awaiting registration. However, employers are waiting for clarity from the department of health on a model to reimburse private sector providers for the costs of vaccinating people who are not on medical schemes, with many employers wanting to vaccinate their employees’ families and surrounding communities as well. “We are almost there on the reimbursement model,” Nyathi said.

Talks are also under way on including “congregate settings” — such as mines, retailers and prisons — in phase 2 that could provide for all adults in such locations to be vaccinated, regardless of age, though it is likely registration will be extended to over-40s in coming weeks. Old-age homes are already classed as congregate settings.

The Nedlac agreement, which has yet to be signed and gazetted by the minister of labour, adds to the existing workplace health and safety protocols for Covid agreed on last year (covering issues such as sanitising, mask wearing and social distancing). Talks are under way on whether vaccines should be made mandatory in some particularly high-risk occupations — such as deep-level mining — if employers can justify this and reach a collective agreement with workers.

However, a spokesperson for the Minerals Council SA, Charmane Russell, said even though the Mine Health & Safety Act allowed for a risk-based approach that could provide for this, the industry would prefer to encourage, educate and persuade employees to get vaccinated.

Cosatu’s Matthew Parks said: “It’s a bit of a sensitive issue. We want people to embrace being vaccinated and we are trying to mobilise workers and their relatives in support of the rollout. We don’t want it to be a fight between workers and employers; we would rather persuade than force and we hope that as momentum gathers no-one will want to refuse a vaccine. The new workplace guidelines we’ve negotiated at Nedlac are based on educating, empowering and persuading.”

Russell said 55 mine-based sites had applied for registration, of which four had been approved. A high proportion of industry employees are on medical schemes and currently only health-care workers and the 6,500 mineworkers over 60 are eligible for the phase 2 vaccine.

The industry has estimated it can vaccinate 3-million people in two months.

B4SA said on Friday that sites’ capacity had slowed on May 17 and 18 because of a lack of clarity on the vaccination of uninsured walk-in patients at private sites, and because of issues with the electronic vaccination data system (EVDS), but that more private sites would be coming online to help with capacity.

Afrocentric CEO Ahmed Banderker said constrained supply was one challenge, in part reflecting the complexity of the system, but another was the low rate of registration, with only 33% of uninsured public patients over 60 and only 57% of private ones registered on the EVDS system so far.

But Banderker said he was “convinced that by the end of June or July we will be well on our way with consistent supply. If in two weeks we can get up to 60,000 a day, when most of the planned private sites don’t even exist yet, then we can definitely do it.”