Austria announces COVID-19 vaccine mandate

ROME >> Austria on Friday became the first Western democracy to announce that it would mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for its entire adult population as it prepared for a nationwide lockdown starting Monday.

The extraordinary measure by Austria, which only days ago separated itself from the rest of Europe by introducing a lockdown for the unvaccinated, who are driving a surge of infections, made for another alarming statement about the severity of the fourth wave of the virus in Europe, now the epicenter of the pandemic.

But it also showed that increasingly desperate governments are losing their patience with vaccine skeptics and shifting from voluntary to obligatory measures to promote vaccinations and beat back a virus that shows no sign of waning, rattling global markets at the prospect that still tentative economic recoveries will be undone.

Some European countries — including Germany, which once seemed a model of how to manage the virus — are now facing their worst levels of infections in the nearly two years since the pandemic began.

The surge, health authorities say, is being driven by stubborn resistance to getting vaccinated in deep pockets of the population, cold weather driving people indoors, and loosened restrictions, rather than new variants.

“For a long time — maybe too long — I and others assumed that it must be possible to convince people in Austria to voluntarily get vaccinated,” Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg of Austria said Friday. “We therefore have reached a very difficult decision to introduce a national vaccine mandate.”

With its latest move, Austria significantly moved ahead of other European countries that have inched up to, but not crossed, a threshold that once seemed unthinkable.