BL Premium reports that the Covid-19 vaccination rate among Discovery’s SA employees has risen from barely a fifth to 94% in the three months since it announced plans to make jabs compulsory from 1 January 2022.
Health and life insurer Discovery was one of the first JSE-listed companies to introduce a mandatory vaccination policy and was swiftly followed by a growing number of firms that now include private hospital groups Mediclinic and Life Healthcare, and insurers Sanlam and Old Mutual. Several universities have followed suit, including Wits, UCT, the University of the Western Cape and the University of the Free State. “We are an organisation that believes in incentives. But when you have [so much] misinformation, I don’t think incentives work. You need regulation. Hence the mandate,” Discovery CEO Adrian Gore explained on Tuesday. He added that the company was working hard to persuade staff who had objected to vaccination to change their minds, but accepted that some might ultimately leave the company. “That’s inevitable. We are saving lives. We have to do the right thing,” he stated. As of Friday, 583 of Discovery’s 9,919 SA-based employees had yet to get vaccinated, of whom 246 said they planned to do so and 337 had formally objected. Covid-19 has already led to 15,000 deaths among members of schemes administered by Discovery Health, and has killed 22 Discovery employees.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Tamar Kahn at BusinessLive (subscriber access only)
- Read too, Almost 95% of Discovery’s staff have received the Covid-19 vaccine, at Moneyweb
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