Care home staff and the COVID-19 vaccine mandate: the moral panic that nobody showed up for

Moral panics are not always successfully engineered. This chapter will consider a failed moral panic in which there was an attempt to scapegoat low-care workers in social care and coerce them with mandatory COVID-19 vaccination as a smokescreen for the UK Government’s failure to protect care home residents during the early stages of the pandemic. The chapter will recount key events and then move on to examine the events from the point of view of moral panic theory, including the elite-engineered model and the moral regulation paradigm and why some of the necessary elements needed for a moral panic were not present. The chapter also considers the high proportion of black and minority ethnic workers within the group that was targeted by mandatory vaccination within a context of racism within healthcare and medical research. The chapter concludes with a discussion of why a more sensitive approach to dealing with the concerns of vaccine-hesitant workers can be more effective in bringing about compliance while avoiding the need for a moral panic to drive behavior change.