Frontline health and care staff should be prevented from treating patients if they refuse to get vaccinated, an expert advising the Government has said.
Professor Calum Semple, who sits on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), said he "passionately believes" that medics should be required to get the jab as part of their contracts.
The Liverpool University academic said he thought vaccines would be made mandatory if uptake rates continued to be poor.
All care workers in England will be required to be fully vaccinated from October unless they have a medical exemption.
The Government is currently considering whether to extend this order to all NHS staff.
It comes as a new study found more than one in 10 patients in the UK were infected with Covid-19 during the first wave while being treated in hospital in for another reason.
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Residential community care hospitals and mental health hospitals had higher levels of hospital-acquired infections - at 61.9% and 67.5% respectively - compared with hospitals providing acute and general care (9.7%) between March and August 2020.
Prof Semple, one of the authors of the research, said the situation has improved since the first wave, when there were issues with testing, PPE supplies and pressures on hospitals.
Rates of hospital-acquired infections are now sitting "somewhere between 2% and 5%".
He also pointed to the success of the vaccination rollout as a contributing factor and said it was vital for medics to get their jabs.
"I do passionately believe that people working in health and social care should be vaccinated as part of their contract of employment," Prof Semple told the Today programme.
Asked if those who refuse should be prevented from treating patients, he said: "That is the logical interpretation of what I am saying.
"I may be an outlier on this but I do see the effects on the frontline of hospital transmission and the devastating effect it has on patients that are immune compromised, those with leukaemia, cancers, extreme susceptibilities."
He said there were "complex issues" with mandatory vaccination, and said it was better to encourage people to get jabbed than to force them.
"I think we need to give our healthcare workers and social care workers time to consider this but if uptake remains poor I think it will become mandated."
The British Medical Association has said mandatory jabs raise "many ethical, legal and practical questions" and insisted that vaccine hesitancy was not the same as flat-out refusal.
Researchers examined records of more than 72,000 patients across 314 hospitals in the UK and found that at least 11.1% of patients were infected with Covid-19 after being admitted to hospital.
The researchers said: "We estimate between 5,699 and 11,862 patients admitted in the first wave were infected during their stay in hospital.
"This is, unfortunately, likely to be an under-estimate, as we did not include patients who may have been infected but discharged before they could be diagnosed."
Birmingham University lecturer Dr Chris Green, one of the study authors, said: "There are likely to be a number of reasons why many patients were infected in these care settings.
"These include the large numbers of patients admitted to hospitals with limited facilities for case isolation, limited access to rapid and reliable diagnostic testing in the early stages of the outbreak, the challenges around access to and best use of PPE, our understanding of when patients are most infectious in their illness, some misclassification of cases due to presentation with atypical symptoms, and an under-appreciation of the role of airborne transmission."
The researchers added that good infection control practices, along with the use of PPE and side rooms in hospitals have considerably reduced the rates of hospital-acquired infections.
But they added that more needs to be understood about Covid-19 transmission in hospitals, in preparation for the winter months.
