Good Morning Britain was today hosted by Susanna Reid and her good friend Judge Rob Rinder.
They were joined live from Hull by care worker Louise Akester who went viral on Tiktok after she posted a video where she broke down in tears after final shift – she has lost her job for refusing the Covid vaccine. Louise, 36, has spent the last three years working at Alderson House in Hull but has worked in the care sector for 14 years.
She began: “I feel lost. I don’t know what to do with myself. I’ve done it for such a long time, I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”
On her reasons for not being vaccinated, she revealed: “I don’t trust it yet. I think I would rather wait until we’ve got long term data and evidence coming back in. It’s gone through so many vigorous tests and such, it’s still classed as being in trials until 2023. And I know it was rushed through for emergency purposes, but I just don’t feel that we know enough about it yet. I don’t feel safe having it yet.”
But she revealed that she has “had other vaccines.”
On working through the pandemic and looking after the most vulnerable within society during that time, yet now up to 60,000 of her care workers colleagues will be losing their jobs if not vaccinated, she said: “I think it’s absolutely disgusting the way they’ve treated us. We were there right from the beginning when all of this came about and none of us knew what we were up against, we didn’t know what we were facing.
“Everybody else was put in lockdown and everybody else was at home safe with their loved ones, and we were still having to go out and face all of this and it was petrifying, it really was scary. There were no vaccinations then, there were shortages of PPE and we still turned up, we still did our best.”
Rob Rinder spoke about how his own family rely heavily upon care worker support for his elderly grandparents, one of whom is currently very sick. He said to Louise: “You are underpaid and overworked, that’s not a throat clearing, that’s a fact.”
He then asked what would persuade her to be vaccinated and she replied: “The way I see it is yes, we do care for vulnerable people, but so do the people who work for the NHS and in the hospitals. So how is it that they seem to have skipped the mandate past them – I know theirs is coming – but then they’ve skipped straight to the carers?
“The only reason we had so many deaths in care homes is because they were allowed out of the hospitals infected with Covid into the homes. That’s how I caught Covid last year. I still did everything in my power – I’ve had so many people who have said. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t want you near my grandparents being unvaxxed, you’re not doing enough to protect them.'”
She continued: “But I need to argue that fact. Yes, I was doing enough to protect them because as soon as that PPE became available we were wearing it all. Following all the guidelines, all the protocols for all of the infection control. Before every single shift you had to have your temperature taken, you had to do at least three lateral flow tests a week.
“… And I think, what more is it that people are going to expect?”
Watch the full interview at www.itv.com/hub, Good Morning Britain weekdays from 6am on ITV and ITV Hub
