Father claims discrimination against vaccine centre workers who refuse jab

The Government’s Vaccine Resource Centre is facing a possible lawsuit over claims of employment discrimination and alleged unfair dismissal.

Rickey Harrison is alleging that his 21-year-old son and five other University of the West Indies (UWI) graduates were “unceremoniously dismissed” as data entry workers from the centre for to refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.

But the man who set up the facility, Major David Clarke, the joint coordinator of the National Vaccination Programme, on Tuesday categorically rejected claims of discrimination, insisting the workers were volunteers and that it was essential they be in a “bubble” of inoculated staff.

Major Clarke said: “This is a vaccine unit. This is what we do. So I can’t have people in the vaccine unit that are not vaccinated. How can we be pushing something that we are not willing to take ourselves? If the whole unit goes down [with COVID], what is going to happen to the vaccine programme?”

Harrison said he was currently exploring the possibility of taking the unit to court, claiming that there is no law in Barbados which says that a person has to be vaccinated in order to maintain a job.

“I have looked at the Constitution of Barbados, particularly Section 11 and Section 23; and it speaks to discrimination… and I have also had a cursory look at the Employment Rights Act to see where my legal legs would stand me…but I certainly intend to have this matter pursued because it is a clear case of discrimination,” he told Barbados TODAY

The disgruntled father further claimed: “We know that there are nurses who work on the frontline who have refused to take the vaccine. I certainly know of nurses who have not yet taken the vaccine and say they have no intention of taking such.

“It is fair to say that I will be exploring the possibility of taking legal action against this particular entity.”

In a separate voice message posted earlier on social media, Harrison said that while Government was saying it had no policy in place for mandatory vaccination, “on August 16, 2021, seven university graduates between the ages of 19 and 23, were unceremoniously dismissed from their jobs of data entry personnel at the Vaccine Resource Centre headed by Dr Elizabeth Ferdinand and Major David Clarke”.

“The reason? They were unvaccinated. This is discrimination at its highest and smacks of contempt for the young people of Barbados who have effectively been told, ‘you can’t work unless you are vaccinated’. This is telling Barbadians, vaccination or else. Is this what we have become, that we no longer have freedom of choice…that we are being held to ransom because of our personal choices?”

Harrison argued that the Constitution speaks to the fact that only Parliament can enact legislation “and to the best of my knowledge that has not taken place so far”.

But in an equally robust response, Major Clarke said that the UWI graduates were not paid employees but volunteers.

He also made it clear that they were told up front that in order to be volunteers for a vaccine unit they must be vaccinated.

“They were not fired. They were volunteers. When I set up the unit, I did a volunteer conduct policy, which says that because we are a small unit, I would like everybody in my unit to be vaccinated,” Major Clarke told Barbados TODAY.

“We brought on some new volunteers, but we had more than 50 people and I said ‘we cannot have 50 people in this small space… the COVID Monitoring Unit would kill me’. So I said part of the volunteer conduct policy is you must be willing to be vaccinated.

“If you are not willing to be vaccinated, then you volunteer somewhere else. So I didn’t fire them because I didn’t hire them to start with. We trained a group of about 20 or 30 volunteers last week, but my office, the space [is] too small… [to] have all of these people. So I said, if we are going to be operating in a bubble, only the people who are vaccinated could be in this bubble. If not, you volunteer somewhere else.”

Asked if the graduates had agreed upfront to be vaccinated in order to operate in the facility, the vaccine campaign coordinator said: “They had just come on. They haven’t signed the volunteer conduct policy yet. So they were never full volunteers… they were trained and told what to expect of volunteers, but they were not full volunteers yet.”

Fellow coordinator of the vaccination programme, Dr Elizabeth Ferdinand, insisted that the decision of the unit was justified.

“We had said from the beginning… I can’t get volunteers to come and work with us and then put them out there to meet the public who could be positive,” she said. “You are preparing your army for war. If, say now, we got an outbreak and one of our people [was infected] we all now into quarantine…the bubble in trouble.”
(emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb)