Austria to require COVID shots for all adults
Austria on Friday became the first Western democracy to announce that it would mandate COVID 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.
Austria’s vaccine mandate will take effect in February.
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 said. “We therefore have reached a very difficult decision to introduce a national vaccine mandate.”
The announcement drew an immediate threat of violent protest this weekend by leaders of anti-vaccine movements and the far-right Freedom Party, which compared the government’s latest mandates with those of a dictatorship.
The notion of requiring vaccination in adults against COVID was a line that Europe had seemed unwilling to cross. But just as lockdowns have become a fact of life, vaccine mandates are increasingly becoming plausible. German lawmakers in parliament voted Thursday to force unvaccinated people going to work or using public transit to provide daily test results.