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Govt wants to 'incentivise' the homeless into being jabbed

English councils can offer cash for rough sleepers to get Covid jabs, says minister

Eddie Hughes says local authorities can use part of £28m protect and vaccinate scheme to incentivise jabs

Rough sleepers in England can be offered cash and food vouchers if they agree to having a Covid jab, the government has confirmed.

Eddie Hughes, the minister for rough sleeping, said councils could use part of the government’s £28m protect and vaccinate scheme to incentivise vaccinations for those on the streets, in the first scheme of its kind in the UK.

The disclosure, first reported in the Local Government Chronicle, comes amid growing impatience within government circles with people refusing to take up the Covid vaccine offers.

While the UK has one of the highest vaccine uptakes in the world – with more than 85% of adults double-jabbed, according to government data – millions are yet to have a full vaccine course.

The homeless population has been especially hard hit by Covid-19, with one in 50 deaths among this group related to coronavirus in 2020, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The government’s suggestion of possible incentives was described by Hughes at a ministerial webinar with council leaders and ministers on 17 December.

Speaking after the levelling up secretary, Michael Gove, Hughes said people who slept rough were a group with very low levels of vaccination and there was likely to be a degree of vaccine hesitancy.

“So we’re making an additional pot of money available to incentivise vaccinations for this group. This funding will help local authorities and their partners to use their understanding of the needs of rough sleepers to increase the vaccination take-up.

“Incentivisation will be at the discretion of local authorities but could include transport, subsistence, childcare and support workers’ costs. So I want to be clear, you will have considerable support to do this,” he said.

Reacting to the government’s plans, Andrew Bridgen, the senior Conservative MP for North West Leicestershire, said he would be deeply uncomfortable if it meant a straightforward transaction of cash for a jab.

“I am not sure if that is informed consent,” he said. “It sounds like induced consent. It is like offering food to someone in need and then taking it away if they are vaccine-hesitant. That would be wrong.

“I would not be averse to offering snacks and then discussing the risks of vaccination,” he added. “But any threat of withholding food if they refuse a vaccine is not right.”

Adam Holloway, the Conservative MP for Gravesham, who went undercover in a documentary to expose homelessness in London, welcomed the move. “We have to do everything we can to persuade this group of people to do what they can to get vaccinated,” he said.

“There is a risk because many are drug addicted and have mental health issues. Usually, I would have a problem with giving money to people living on the street.

“But this plan appears to be a good move given that so many are not in good health and are vulnerable to the virus.”

A spokesperson for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities said: “The discretion given to councils include[s] the ability to offer cash or food vouchers as incentives for vaccination.”

Many people who are homeless or sleeping rough are likely to have underlying health conditions. These are likely to be under-diagnosed or not properly reflected in GP records.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advised in March that local teams consider a universal offer to adults experiencing homelessness and rough sleeping alongside those in priority group 6. They should also be offered the vaccine without the need for an NHS number or GP registration.

At the webinar, Hughes said the protect and vaccinate scheme was a further development of “Everyone In”, the March 2020 initiative providing safe accommodation for rough sleepers.

“We’ll be building on the success of that programme, which gave us the opportunity to work with people that we haven’t previously been able to reach. Hopefully, this will now allow us to provide accommodation to those particularly vulnerable people, but the pre-eminent element is getting people vaccinated,” he said.

Informed consent? Out the window
As Andrew Bridgen (Con) pointed out, this would amount to offering them all food and/or cash, then withdrawing the offer to those that refuse jabbing.
No registration - so could homeless people get more food/cash with more jabs?

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I think this idea was floated a week or two ago. With the possible exception of Bridgen every person quoted in the text is a scumbag. If Covid is behind 2% of deaths among homeless what are the others dying of?

Years ago I worked in a direct access hostel. The rate of fatalities was appalling then and I doubt it has changed. One example was the night a car pulled into a drive, a passenger was helped out of the back, and the car sped off again. The man collapsed. My colleagues brought him in and he was so weak they couldn’t get him as far as the dormitories so he spent about a day and a half in a small interview room in a sleeping bag before a doctor would finally deign to visit.

Diagnosis: advanced tuberculosis, classic disease of the most deprived. He was taken to hospital and died within a few more days. We never even found out his name.

Another time a clearly very deranged man was admitted. Singing hymns very loudly but essentially harmless. The next day he walked the half a mile or so to the station and waited at the end of the platform for a nonstopping train. And the rest you can guess.

The last time I saw a guy begging in our town I gave him a tenner and if he spent it on Special Brew good luck to him.

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Hi folks,

a. paying people to get an experimental jab is a breach of the nuremberg code as it is a form of duress or overreaching or ulterior form of coercion.

[“ THE NUREMBERG CODE

  1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
    This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be
    so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved, as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that, before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject, there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person, which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.
    The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.
  2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.
  3. The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study, that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.
  4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
  5. No experiment should be conducted, where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.
  6. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
  7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
  8. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.
  9. During the course of the experiment, the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end, if he has reached the physical or mental state, where continuation of the experiment seemed to him to be impossible.
  10. During the course of the experiment, the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgement required of him, that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.
    [“Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10”, Vol. 2, pp. 181-182. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949.]” ]

b. Any chance the politicos are trying to cut the homeless so they are able to make a free informed choice , clearly not in the light of their lockdown no jab no job approach which ultimately means no house!

c. Getting covid whilst living outside in zero temperatures is the last illness they need to be worrying about ffs!

These bureauc-rats need sanctioning!

cheers

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Now a world government wannabee wants to carry the idea one stage further.

Think global, act local :slightly_smiling_face: :wink:

North Korea should be convinced into accepting 60 million Covid vaccine doses, says UN official

Just as the caring UK government didn’t think about just giving the homeless food regardless, the UN expert didn’t think of just giving NK food either. Both saw the opportunity for using the food crisis as a bargaining chip.
You can see the coercion in the language. NK ‘should be convinced’.
ED

‘It is imperative that the population of North Korea start to be vaccinated’

Arpan Rai

46 minutes ago

Comments

North Korea, led by Kim Jong-un, has an obligation to balance out its people’s need for food, says UN official

(Getty Images)

North Korea should be provided at least 60 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines and the international community should come together to chart out a strategy for this, an independent UN human rights investigator has said.

“It is imperative that the population of North Korea start to be vaccinated… so that the government will have no excuse to maintain the closing of the borders,” Tomas Ojea Quintana, a UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, said on Wednesday.

Covid vaccines could be a way to convince the hermit kingdom to ease its lockdown regulations which have currently sealed off some 26 million people in the country amid reports of harsh winter and starvation, the UN official said while speaking in Seoul.

“The most serious situation in North Korea is food,” Mr Ojea Quintana said, adding that some of Pyongyang’s most vulnerable population is staring at the risk of starvation.

The official added that he had floated the idea of providing 60 million Covid jabs to North Korea during meetings with international diplomats in Seoul, but the proposals have not yet reached Pyongyang’s door formally.

A number of issues would need to be worked out, including payments and sanction hurdles North Korea currently faces, he said.

North Korea has an obligation to balance out its people’s need for food, which is linked to their freedom of movement, even if it sees legitimate public health reasons to shut itself out from the rest of the world, Mr Ojea Quintana said.

By imposing these restrictions and closing itself off from the rest of the world, North Korea has damaged the existing situation as it continues to rely on commercial activities along China’s border, the official said.

This has been magnified by the impact of sanctions, further impacting the country and millions in it, he said.

The UN special investigator has asked for the calls for sanctions on North Korea to be more flexible in order to not cause humanitarian harm to ordinary residents.

North Korea is the only known country to have not officially announced any Covid cases, deaths or even its own vaccination plans.

The borders to North Korea remained shut for two years until they opened gradually last month.

It has rejected shipments of the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine clubbed under the global Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) initiative as it feared side effects, according to a South Korean think-tank.

None of the Pyongyang officials are known to have asked for Covid vaccines, even as the status of the country’s handling of the Covid pandemic remains unclear.

According to the Unicef, the Kim Jong-un-led country also turned down an offer of 3 million Covid vaccine doses of China’s Sinovac Biotech last year.

Mr Ojea Quintana said North Korean officials appeared to be suspicious of receiving a partial amount of vaccines and “then to be under pressure to accept more, something that could be resolved by reaching a deal to provide enough doses for the whole country”.

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It’s a masterpiece of it’s type lol.

A very nice touch is the repetition of the phrase ‘Kim Jong-un-led’ /‘led by Kim Jong-un’ so that the very dim make the necessary connection between Official Bad Guy (cheats at golf, poison darts, that guy) and Official Bad Policy.

It’s imperative that these Official Bad Guys just stop all that bad stuff and do what we want them to. How dare they close their borders for two years: lockdowns cause starvation, it says here. But only in Certain Places like this ‘hermit kingdom’. (There’s a King of Korea??) Do they perhaps mean to take advantage of the association between ‘hermit’ and ‘incel school shooter in the making’? Or that mad old lady, might be a witch, the one with the 33 cats and eight foot piles of newspapers everywhere?

The ‘international community’ would be the so very caring neighbours who still have crayon drawings of rainbows in their windows.

And so on.

Picking up the ‘words have lost their meaning’ trope: yup, here’s more proof.

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