Austria mandates compulsory  covid-19 vaccination

A covid-19 checkpoint in Austria

 
2,507Views 28Comments Posted 19/11/2021

The Austrian government announced Friday the fourth general confinement since the beginning of the pandemic and, to get out of the "vicious circle" of restrictions, it imposes mandatory vaccination of the entire population as of February.

Austria, where 65% of the population has become the first European country to introduce a mandatory immunization against covid and is also the first to return to confinement in the latest wave. The Alpine republic is leading the latest restrictive measures on the continent to stop infections, including the unprecedented confinement of the unvaccinated that was introduced last Monday.

  Despite months of persuasion, despite all the media campaigns, despite everything, we have not been able to convince everyone to get vaccinated," Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg lamented. The conservative politician criticized the formations that oppose vaccination, such as the far-right party FPÖ, and defined its position as "irresponsible" and "an attack against the health system."

"So we are faced with a very difficult decision, the decision that a nationwide mandatory vaccination should begin quickly," Schallenberg said. Those who do not comply with the regulations can face harsh administrative sanctions although which ones have not been specified.

The head of the Government was sure of the legality of the measure and recalled that in the past a forced vaccination against smallpox was applied after the Second World War. The measures were announced when the contagion rate is among the highest on the continent, with about a thousand cases per 100,000 inhabitants in seven days. In the last 24 hours, a new record was registered with 15,809 positives and there are already more than five hundred patients in the ICU, with hospitals in the Salzburg and Upper Austria regions at the limit of their capacities. Both the vaccination for all and the new confinement were agreed upon between the central government of conservatives and environmentalists and the regional authorities, in a meeting that lasted until the wee hours of the morning. The leader of the far-right FPÖ, Herbert Kickl, is in quarantine after a covid infection and has advocated a  dewormer, ibuprofen and vitamin C  to treat covid-19.