Dr Hilary Jones has shared he no longer believes it should be mandatory for NHS staff to have the Covid vaccine, now that the government plan to "abandon" all coronavirus restrictions in England - having previously supported the mandatory policy.
Speaking on Good Morning Britain on Thursday, Hilary explained that forcing healthcare workers to get the vaccine but then ditching self-isolation, even for people who have tested positive for the virus, "didn't make sense".
It comes amid reports that 80,000 healthcare professionals remain unvaccinated, and are at risk of losing their jobs over the mandatory policy.
A guest on the show was called out by Hilary over his comments about there being higher infection rates in vaccinated people, before he went on to call for mandatory jabs to be scrapped.
Dr Steve James, a Critical Care Consultant, recently challenged Health Secretary Sajid Javid during a hospital visit over the government's policy of mandatory vaccinations for NHS staff.
Speaking on GMB on Thursday, he told hosts Susanna Reid and Ben Shephard how he would walk away from his job if the ruling was in place, declining to have the vaccine.
He said: "Infection rates are higher in people who are vaccinated so it completely goes against the argument that being vaccinated is gonna reduce transmission."
Susanna noticed Hilary was shaking his head in disagreement, with him replying: "Well there are far more people who have been vaccinated than those who haven't, so of course there are gonna be higher rates of infection in people who have been vaccinated.
"That’s a completely ridiculous argument and the data doesn’t support that."
Speaking of his change in view on whether mandatory vaccines for NHS staff was right, he went on: "I think that doctors and nurses, and other healthcare professionals, have always had a duty of care to protect their patients as much as possible, to keep them safe and part of that has got to be vaccination.
"Now in an ideal world everybody looking after patents right now would be vaccinated.
"However, since we are abandoning all restrictions for Covid-19, since we’re stopping self-isolation for people who will have Covid, there absolutely is no point in making this mandatory now for those 80,000 staff because it's a drop in the ocean in protecting patients."
Ben said: "Regarding the mandatory vaccination of healthcare professionals, there’s 80,000 who haven’t been vaccinated."
Hilary replied: "And some have medical exemption, there’s about 52,000 who don’t which is about 3.5 percent..."
Ben then interrupted bringing up the huge vacancies within healthcare staff at the moment, with Hilary going on to repeat his thoughts.
He said: "Absolutely, so that’s why I am saying that now, since all restrictions are being abandoned, more people are likely to get the transmission of the Covid outside of hospitals than inside hospitals. So making people lose their jobs over this now makes very little sense."
Susanna asked: "So you would get rid of the mandate?"
Hilary told her: "I would now, because you’ve got so many people with cancer, heart disease, and strokes who need hospital care, that losing that number of staff right now when we're abandoning other restrictions doesn’t make any sense to me."
Good Morning Britain airs weekdays at 6am on ITV.
