Thursday, October 21
Woolworths has announced it intends to require its Australian workforce to get vaccinated against COVID-19 in the coming months.
The decision will apply group-wide and cover Australian team members working in stores, distribution and online fulfilment centres, and support offices.
“We have a clear obligation to provide our team members with the safest possible work environment as we supply the food and essential needs our communities rely on,” Woolworths Group CEO Brad Banducci said.
“We have 170,000 team members across our stores, distribution centres and support offices, and more than 1200 retail stores.
“With each store welcoming an average 20,000 customers a week, a single team member can come into contact with quite literally thousands of people in the course of a normal working week.”
Mr Banducci said that as Australia enters the next phase of the pandemic and learns to live with COVID-19, the company needs to strengthen its workplace safety settings, and vaccinations are a key part of this.
“After careful review of the best medical advice, we’ve made the decision to require all of our team members in Australia to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19,” Mr Banducci said.
Unless public health orders come into effect sooner, the proposed timeline for the full vaccination requirement in the ACT, NSW, NT, Victoria and WA is January 31, 2022.
It will be March 31, 2022, in the other States, including Queensland.
Woolworths will engage with its staff and others who regularly visit its workplaces to understand any practical and individual issues in meeting the requirement.
This will include allowing for legitimate medical and religious exemptions.
Mr Banducci said about a third of Woolworths Group’s Australian workforce was already subject to State-issued health orders which required either full- or part-vaccination in order to work.
The company has been strongly encouraging its team members to get vaccinated since the beginning of the national rollout.
It offers paid leave for frontline team members to access vaccination bookings, and has also established vaccine clinics at its distribution centres and closed BIG W stores.
So far, more than 12,000 Woolworths staff have received vaccination doses in these clinics.
Mr Banducci said that given the company’s important role in providing food and everyday needs to the community, Woolworths will not require its customers to be vaccinated to access food and other essentials in its stores.
That’s very good news from Woolies. I don’t want to pick up a deadly virus along with my weekly groceries.
We have to think of this virus as if it was an alien enemy. If we don’t do everything we can to fight against it, it WILL destroy more lives. Anyone who CAN be vaccinated, but refuses to do so, is facilitating the spreading of the virus. They are empowering this enemy. In times or war it’s regarded as a treasonable act to assist the enemy.
If a person does get attacked by SARS-CoV-2 (the name of the virus that results in the illness we call COVID-19) they are immediately putting other people’s lives at risk, just as they would be if they were drink-driving.
If they pass the virus on to another person, possibly a family member, and that person dies, they are the cause of that death just as if they had shot them, but instead of with a bullet, it’s with a deadly virus coming our of their own respiratory system.
If people want their lives to get back to normal they must oppose the spreading of the virus in every way they can. Getting vaccinated is one way to oppose this deadly disease.
Obviously we can’t travel back to the past, but if we could we’d experience first hand the devastation viruses have caused. Humanity fought hard to rid the world of smallpox, and it’s been an ongoing battle against many other deadly diseases. For people to take a stance now against vaccination is, I believe, done from ignorance of the past.
And it’s not just viruses that are a threat. The bubonic plague, a bacterium, killed one-third of the European/North African human population in the space of 7 years from 1346 to 1353. An estimated death toll of up to 200 million people. And it’s still around. Madagascar has experienced outbreaks as recent as 2008, 2013 and 2017.
Humanity is very lucky that SARS-CoV-2 isn’t as deadly as the Ebola or Marburg viruses. These viruses have a case fatality rate of up to 90%. To my knowledge, there are no vaccines for them yet. If there was a pandemic of either of these viruses, and a vaccine existed, getting vaccinated would be mandatory and enforced, no ifs, buts or maybes about it.
Hopefully, the world never sees such a pandemic, but with terrorists willing to do anything to achieve their goals, it’s always a possibility.