Two out of three ain’t bad — unless your office has a mandatory COVID vaccine policy.
As the COVID vaccine booster rollout widens, labour law experts say workplace mandates will eventually include a third shot.
“Once the boosters become widely available, every company which has a vaccine mandate will add the booster,” said Howard Levitt, senior partner at Levitt Sheikh LLP, a law firm specializing in labour and employment law.
On Monday, Ontario began accepting bookings for COVID booster shots for anyone 50 and over who got their second shot at least 168 days earlier. In early January, bookings will be extended to include people 18 and over. The widening availability of booster shots come as Ontario faces rapidly-rising COVID case counts, and a growing threat from the Omicron variant.
Workplace COVID mandates typically defer to public health authorities on the definition of “fully vaccinated,” meaning that the policies won’t need much tweaking at all, Levitt said. That means the pitched battles put up by some unions and workers against initial mandates are even less likely to succeed this time around.
“It’s exactly the same thing. The policies follow the advice of chief medical officers, which follows the science,” said Levitt.
If a workplace vaccine policy didn’t include a clause which allowed for changes to the definition of fully vaccinated, employers would have a harder time changing it, said Gregory Sills, an associate at the Samfiru Tumarkin law firm.
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