SOUTH Yorkshire Police Federation will continue to lobby MPs to provide Covid-19 vaccine priority for officers.<\/p>\n
Chairman Steve Kent is due to meet MPs in the coming weeks, and will be keeping up the pressure on the Government in the ongoing fight to get officers jabbed early.<\/p>\n
Every Police Federation in the country spoke of officers\u2019 betrayal earlier this month, when it emerged that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation would not in fact be providing earlier protection against the deadly virus.<\/p>\n
Steve said: \u201cIt\u2019s an absolute betrayal to police officers up and down the country and shows yet again when the cards are on the table that police officers are on a lower value in the Government\u2019s eyes than their colleagues in other sectors.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is looking unfortunately very likely that we\u2019re not going to get officers vaccinated before anybody else but I\u2019ve still got MPs meetings around the coming weeks to apply some pressure.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe good news on the flip side of this is that our force have been extremely proactive in getting any surplus vaccines from our regional colleagues and to that end there\u2019s quite a few officers who have been vaccinated through those surplus vaccines through the force.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do seem to be quite ahead of the ball with that one. There\u2019s quite a lot of officers who have been vaccinated but it\u2019s not the way it should have been done.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steve said the vaccine snub was the \u201csecond of two blows to policing\u201d – after the pay freeze.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cIt\u2019s just not good enough. We get some of the nice words sometimes about the Policing Covenant but it\u2019s never backed up with reality so sadly even though there has been a tone change compared to Theresa May\u2019s Government period in terms of the Government wanting to work with us and whatnot, the underlying issues are still the same.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are still treating us as, unfortunately, as unimportant and valued less than some of our other colleagues in other public sectors.\u201d<\/p>\n
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