Business leaders attending the CEO Roundtable Annual meeting in Victoria Falls have been urged to get their workforces vaccinated in order to mitigate the social and economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the anticipated fourth wave.
This was said by Hwange Colliery Company Limited managing director, Dr Charles Zinyemba who lamented the cost of an unhealthy workforce on business performance.
“The message here is go and get your workforce vaccinated. I know one company has done it. It is possible to go and do it and you should lead by example,” Dr Zinyemba told business leaders.
“If the fourth wave does come, yes some people will get infected but we know that the communities will be protected and most of them will be able to ride the storm.”
The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic globally and locally has put an enormous strain on businesses as a result of disruptions on operations as governments put measures to arrest the spread of the virus but more so due to the loss of life of skilled personnel.
Dr Zinyemba said to avert potential disaster on workforce during the pandemic, Hwange Colliery Company vaccinated all its workforce and its surrounding community to achieve herd immunity in the coal-mining town.
“We have a workforce of 1965 and out of that workforce 363 got infected. Following government and World Health Organisation guidelines, out of that 363 only one failed to recover,” said Dr Zinyemba.
In June this year, the World Bank in its economic update report on Zimbabwe warned that the country risked the sharp reversal of progress on human capital development made over the years if it failed to protect its skilled workforce at work places from the pandemic.
Government has since called for mandatory vaccination for all public service workers and some local companies have recently took the same stance.
Mandatory vaccination has however been met with resistance especially by the country’s largest worker representative -the Zimbabwe Congress for Trade Unions (ZCTU) who took the government and some six companies to court over the issue.
They argue that forced vaccination is an infringement of workers’ rights.
Zimbabwe has one of the region’s leading vaccination campaigns after procuring over 13 million vaccines from China.
However, there seem to be a rather low uptake of vaccines with only 2.5 million Zimbabweans having been fully vaccinated as of Wednesday.
