Western Australia's relatively small number of unvaccinated employees are looking forward to getting back to work now that vaccine mandates are on the way out.
Mandates for the vast majority of employers affected by the Chief Health Officer's recommendation will end after June 10.
Sarah Yates, owner of Our Ruby Girl cafe in Como, said the head chef would love to come back to work.
"We were quite heavily impacted by the vaccine mandate," she said.
"We lost our head chef and one of our baristas who elected to not vaccinate.
"We have been contacted since [news of] the vaccine mandate was dropped yesterday, by our head chef, old head chef, who would love to come back and work for us.
"We've had to operate on a severely reduced menu which of course has had a financial impact.
"That has been down to staffing, not having the quality staff available and also having to manage with staff being off work sick or being deemed close contacts."
However, it won't be so easy for the police.
While WA Police will scrap their mandatory vaccination requirement from next Friday, Commissioner Chris Dawson committed to continuing internal disciplinary action against those who refused to get vaccinated.
There are 30 unvaccinated police force staff members.
'This has polarised the community'
Former officer Jordan McDonald, who resigned over the issue, told 6PR there had been a lot of animosity from the public, and from other officers.
"It's of the view, 'they've [unvaccinated officers] had a six-month paid holiday,'" he said.
"I can tell you that since day one, they haven't wanted a paid holiday, they wanted to just work.
"This has polarised the community.
"I think it's time we all moved on."
An unvaccinated teacher has told the ABC she was looking forward to going back to work, but was uncertain if the mandates in the education sector would be lifted.
Mr McDonald said he believed there would be legal challenges to employers which sought to keep vaccination mandates.
Some big employers have indicated they will go down this path.
Woolworths said it would stick to its requirement for the workforce to be double vaccinated — a policy that applied nationally.
Coles said vaccination would remain a requirement of employment, unless there was a valid medical exemption
"In each state where Coles team members are required to vaccinate as a condition of work — either as a result of government health orders or as part of [Coles's] updated COVID safety measures — Coles intends to maintain this requirement as an ongoing policy," it said in a statement.
In a statement, Westpac said as was announced last year, its employees "are required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to enter a workplace".
Legal experts believe those who were sacked for refusing to follow an employer's direction may not be able to get their jobs back.
'It was so hard trying to get people vaccinated': Premier
Premier Mark McGowan told a business forum breakfast in Joondalup the vaccination mandates were difficult to introduce.
"Unless we did that, we were not going to get to high vaccination levels, we just weren't," he said.
"Because we didn't have the virus here.
"People would say to me 'I don't need to get vaccinated, [because] we don't have the virus'.
"It was so hard trying to get people vaccinated."
He said while some believed they could just worry about it when the virus arrived, that was not going to work.
Mr McGowan said the government's measures led to the best health, economic and social outcomes "on the planet", and without them, there would have been more lockdowns and more deaths.
Chief Health Officer's advice revealed
More than 98 per cent of the WA population has now received two doses of COVID vaccines.
The Chief Health Officer's advice to the Premier was that because the third dose rate was greater than 81 per cent, the focus needed to shift to protecting the most vulnerable, and there was no need to continue most worker mandates.
The advice was that mandates should only apply in healthcare settings, and "residential aged and disability care settings where there is frequent contact with the most vulnerable groups".
"Although other workforces, such as the WA Police Force or the Department of Fire and Emergency Services, may have intermittent contact with vulnerable people, the risk of prolonged contact with a high number of vulnerable people is not the same as for healthcare workers or those caring for people in aged care or disability residential settings," he said.
"Given the high rate of vaccination achieved in WA, and the high number of people already exposed to COVID-19, most vaccination directions are now no longer required."
Directions regarding proof of vaccination for visitors to residential aged care services will continue.
