Should freelancers get vaccines and medical care from employers?
Cooronavirus does not discriminate. Anyone can get it, pass it on, be affected by it and affect others with it. We can all be carriers of this deadly virus, it does not consider age, gender, religion, or what social status you are in. If you get COVID-19, you better hope that it would not kill your immune system or cause any lasting damage. There are stories of people’s taste never really returning, hearing being affected and of course on going breathing problems. Good thing, our scientists were able to make the vaccine to prevent people from getting seriously ill or any more people dying. In the United Kingdom today, everyone over the age of 16 can get vaccinated. If you are asking should freelancers get vaccinated and receive medical care from employers? The answer is yes. But does it always happen and are some employers saying that they are not responsible for people who are not directly employed by them.
Getting vaccinated against COVID-19 is a must and could protect you, as a worker from being infected, especially if your work environment and tasks requires you to go outdoors. Now that vaccines are widely available, many companies are faced with the dilemma of how to deal with employees who refuse to be vaccinated. Employers are put in a tough position as a result of this. If any of their employees decline to receive the coronavirus vaccination, the risk of infection among their employees, clients, and business partners may increase. Although we know that being a freelancer is not the same as being a regular full time employee; as one of the major cons of being a freelancer is not getting benefits like health insurance from employers. Hence, it is not an excuse to not get yourself vaccinated but all the more you have to.
Pfizer-BioNTech, Oxford-AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Janssen are the four vaccines that have been authorised for use in the UK so far; three of them require two doses for maximum protection. Pfizer-BioNTech is the only vaccine presently authorised for under-18s in the UK, while those under 40 are being provided an alternative to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
