Austria is the first member state of the European Union to introduce mandatory vaccination for people over the age of 18 from February.
The new German government has been considering mandatory vaccination since it took office in early December. However, while the coalition parties have agreed to put the issue to a vote in the federal parliament, the Bundestag, they do not seem to have clear plans for when that will happen.
Plans for mandatory vaccination have polarized society, some are for and some are against. Why?
Politicians admit that these are "sensitive plans", and as a poll for the magazine Profil shows, a slim majority in Austria opposes mandatory vaccination.
Namely, it turned out that in Austria, 51 percent of respondents were against the introduction of mandatory vaccination, of which 34 percent were against mandatory vaccination in general, and 17 percent believed that they should wait.
The survey showed that 45 percent of Austrians approve of mandatory vaccination from February.
Thousands of people protested in Vienna on Saturday, January 15, over the government's plans for mandatory vaccination against COVID-19.
"The government must go!" they shouted at a rally in the center of Vienna, which has become a routine event on Saturdays, Reuters reports.
Austria's parliament is due to vote in the second half of January on this issue, which is dividing the country as the number of cases of corona virus infection rises.
By mid-January, Austrian health authorities reported more than 1,4 million infections and almost 14.000 deaths since the pandemic was declared in early 2020.
Fines for the unvaccinated
At the beginning of December, the Austrian government prepared the first draft of the law on compulsory vaccination and called for the measures to be introduced in February. These measures foresee fines of up to 3.600 euros for those who do not comply with them.
"Without mandatory vaccination, we will always fall behind," said Health Minister Wolfgang Mueckstein. He stated that the current variant of the corona virus, omicron, will not be the last and that it is still unclear how stable the immunity that is acquired after infection with the latest variant of the virus is.
"All the experts believe that we will need a high level of immunity in the population next fall, too," Mueckstein said, according to Euronews.
"With the mandatory vaccine, we will be able to achieve important additional percentages in the vaccination rate," noted Mueckstein.
As Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehamer said, the law was "designed to respond to the flexibility of the virus".
In the first phase, the authorities will write to every household to inform them of the new rules. Pregnant women and people who cannot be vaccinated due to medical reasons will be excluded, as well as those who have recovered from the disease of COVID-19 in the past six months.
From mid-March, police will start checking vaccination status during routine checks. Those who cannot provide proof of vaccination will receive a written request to do so, and if they do not get vaccinated they will be fined 600 euros.
If the authorities judge that general vaccination is not enough, then they will send reminders to people who are still unvaccinated, Chancellor Nehamer said.
If even this measure is not enough, people will be scheduled for vaccination and will be fined if they do not meet the appointment. Fines could be as high as 3.600 euros if people challenge their fines, which officials hope will not be necessary.
According to the constitution
Karoline Edtstadler, the cabinet minister responsible for constitutional affairs, said individuals could be fined a maximum of four times a year and there was no provision for them to serve jail time instead of paying.
A commission consisting of at least two medical and two legal experts will report to the government and parliament every three months on the progress of vaccination.
Parts of the law could be suspended by the health minister, with the approval of a parliamentary committee, if, for example, future variants of the virus are milder or experts say vaccination is no longer the way forward, Edtstadler said.
The plan for compulsory vaccination was drawn up at the same time as the now lifted quarantine was introduced in November, due to concerns that Austria's vaccination rate was relatively low for Western Europe.
As of Sunday, January 16, 71,6 percent of Austria's population of 8,9 million was considered fully vaccinated.
Slow procedures in Germany
Germany reported a record 81.000 cases of infection in mid-January as the omicron strain spreads, having already hit Great Britain, France and Denmark.
Even so, the vaccination campaign has slowed down, hampering new German chancellor Olaf Scholz's plans to vaccinate 80 percent of the population with at least one dose by the end of January.
Olaf Šolc's first major initiative as chancellor was to make vaccines against COVID-19 mandatory, but he transferred the decision on the imposition to other political bodies.
At the end of November, a week before he was elected chancellor, Scholz promoted mandatory vaccination, saying that he wanted to start such a program by the beginning of February in Germany, which lags behind many other European Union (EU) countries in terms of the number of people vaccinated.
He was one of many politicians who initially rejected mandatory vaccination, but changed their minds when the highly contagious omicron strain emerged, sparking concerns that the 28 percent of Germany's population not fully vaccinated could contribute to the increased death toll from the pandemic that has now reached 115.000 fatalities.
He later postponed the launch of the program to March. Now, the chancellor's party - the Social Democrats - admits that the debate on the mandatory vaccination plan could take many months, as Politico magazine writes. And some policy analysts say mandatory vaccinations may never happen.
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