Fact Check-No evidence that 87,000 Dutch nurses refused COVID-19 vaccine

Fact Check-No evidence that 87,000 Dutch nurses refused COVID-19 vaccine

(Reuters) - Claims online that 87,000 nurses in the Netherlands have refused a COVID-19 vaccine are baseless – and have been drawn from a video containing misinformation that was released before any vaccines were rolled out.

Hundreds of social media users have shared a screenshot of the claim made on an amateur blogsite in June (here and here). It reads: “87,000 Dutch doctors and nurses refuse to be vaccinated” (archive.is/NqaiR).

The blog itself links to a video published in October 2020, four months before the Netherlands began its vaccination rollout (here), in which a Dutch woman makes several claims about COVID-19.

She begins by saying the disease is a “normal flu virus” - a claim previously debunked by Reuters (here) - before saying she is in contact with “87,000 nurses that do not want the vaccine that is being prepared for us”.

“They are not willing to be the guinea pig,” she adds, without providing evidence for her assertions.

Reuters could find no public record suggesting 87,000 nurses in the Netherlands were planning to refuse a COVID-19 vaccine – nor a record of 87,000 having done so.

The screenshots say the Dutch woman is a member of the World Doctors Alliance, a group of doctors and activists. The World Doctors Alliance did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters.

VACCINE UPTAKE

According to a Dutch government website, there were around 207,000 registered nurses in the Netherlands as of July 1 (here), meaning 87,000 is around 42% of the total.

It is difficult to compare this percentage with data from the Dutch health ministry due to the nature of the vaccine rollout, a spokesperson told Reuters, while adding that uptake among healthcare workers had been high.

The first people to be vaccinated in the Netherlands, starting Jan. 6, were frontline healthcare workers in acute care, such as doctors, intensive care unit (ICU) staff and ambulance workers (here).

This initial cohort were vaccinated “in and by their respective workplaces,” the spokesperson said, adding this group was “highly motivated to get vaccinated”. The spokesperson estimated that more than 90% had been inoculated to date.

Following this, the GGD (municipal health services) invited approximately 700,000 people working in healthcare branches for vaccination. This included nurses working in non-critical care units, care home workers and hospital cleaning staff.

The spokesperson told Reuters that 70% to 80% of this group responded directly to the invitation and had received two shots.

The exact number is not calculable, however. “This is due to the fact that these people also received invitations for vaccination later on in the year, based on their year of birth”.

The spokesperson continued: “We do not register people’s profession in the vaccination program and therefore we are not sure how many people in this second round of vaccination invitations belong to the health care branch.”

Not all healthcare workers were invited via the GGD, nor those working in acute care, such as general practitioners and mental health workers. The percentage of those healthcare workers who received the vaccine in later cohorts is not known.

“This is also because we do not know whether all vaccinations were indeed given to health care workers: surplus vaccinations could be given to, for example, patients if they were eligible for vaccination at that time,” the spokesperson said.

The health ministry also conducts regular surveys into the population’s willingness to get a COVID-19 vaccine, with the current percentage standing at 87% (here).

VERDICT

False. There is no evidence that 87,000 nurses have refused a COVID-19 vaccine in the Netherlands; rather, a Dutch health ministry spokesperson said uptake had been high across health professionals.

This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here .