The Guardian view on Europe’s Covid protests: treat with care
As a fourth wave of Covid-19 infections threatens to overwhelm intensive care units in hospitals from Brussels to Berlin, European governments have begun to sound exasperated as well as anxious. On Monday, the German health minister, Jens Spahn, starkly laid out the stakes of the coming winter, in terms designed to function as a wake-up call. By the spring, Mr Spahn warned, the vast majority of Germans would be “vaccinated, cured or dead”. The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, dismissed violent protesters against restrictions on the unjabbed as “idiots”, while his Belgian counterpart, Alexander De Croo, said that similar scenes in Brussels were “absolutely unacceptable”.
The comments of Mr Rutte and Mr De Croo were explicitly directed at the violent fringe that hijacked demonstrations in the Belgian capital and Rotterdam. But there is a more general sense of frustration among political leaders in western Europe: as an expected autumn surge duly comes to pass, a significant minority of citizens are deepening the crisis by refusing to be vaccinated. Dealing with this section of the population, which is far more likely to need hospital treatment after infection, has become a major policy dilemma for governments seeking to juggle civil liberties with the need to protect the interests of society as a whole.
This is treacherous terrain for any liberal democracy. The developing policy response has been to exert a gradual squeeze on the activities of the unvaccinated, in the form of Covid passes and restrictions. These are now being toughened up. In Belgium, proof of vaccination or a negative test will be required to enter cafes, restaurants and nightclubs, and vaccination for care workers has become compulsory. In Germany, similar restrictions are being introduced in states that have a high
rate of Covid-related hospitalisation. The head of the Robert Koch institute – the country’s disease control agency – has said that vaccination rates urgently need to be raised from 68% to well above 75% if a full-blown crisis is to be avoided.
These are understandable and justifiable measures, given exponential rises in infection rates and increasing death rates. Nevertheless, governments will need to tread with exceptional care as they are imposed. They should avoid following the example of Austria, which last week announced that vaccination would be mandatory from February. As the World Health Organization emphasised on Tuesday, a “vaccine plus” approach, emphasising the importance of social distancing and mask-wearing for all citizens, is necessary. And while libertarian arguments cannot be allowed to trump the need for social solidarity in the context of a pandemic, formal discrimination against those who remain unvaccinated needs to be supplemented by more vigorous drives to inform, persuade and listen to the reluctant and sceptical.
This is particularly true in sections of the population where trust in government is at historic lows and a sense of civic disenfranchisement is already widespread. A two-tier Covid society, if allowed to persist for any meaningful period, will become a gift to far-right parties seeking fertile ground. Austria’s Freedom party, recently damaged by a corruption scandal that saw its popularity plummet, is using anti-vaccination protests as a means to rehabilitation. In Germany, a fraught debate is now under way over whether a move to mandatory vaccination would violate the constitutional right to “bodily integrity”. In Berlin and elsewhere, it is vital that a more consensual route is found.