Austria Announces Covid Vaccine Mandate, Crossing a Threshold for Europe

ROME — 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.

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, loosened restrictions and possibly waning immunity among those previously vaccinated.

“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 on 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. 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.

Many European countries have already instituted mandates in all but name only — requiring strict health passes as proof of vaccination, recovery from infection or a negative test to partake in most social functions, travel or to go to work. Many already require children to be vaccinated against measles and other illnesses to attend school.

The notion of requiring vaccination in adults against Covid was a line that Europe had seemed unwilling to cross, however, with leaders often contrasting their respect for civil liberties with authoritarian-styled countries.

But just as lockdowns have become a fact of life, vaccine mandates are increasingly becoming plausible. German lawmakers in Parliament voted on Thursday to force unvaccinated people going to work or using public transit to provide daily test results. The country’s vaccination rate among adults is about 79 percent, one of the lowest in Western Europe.

On Friday, Jens Spahn, the acting health minister in Germany, was asked whether a general lockdown was possible for the country. “We are in a position where nothing should be ruled out,” he said.

The specter of a lockdown in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, sent jitters through European markets hungering for economic recovery and sales during the Christmas shopping season.

Austria’s new vaccine mandate will take effect in February, in the hopes that as many people as possible will be motivated to sign up for their initial inoculations, but also booster shots, Austria’s health minister, Wolfgang Mückstein, said.

It also gave leaders time to formalize legal guidelines for the mandate, he said, adding that there would be exceptions for people who are not able to be vaccinated.

The health ministry said that Friday’s announcement was only the first step in drawing up a law that would establish the mandate, a process that would involve civil society and a careful review. Details about how the law would be carried out and enforced would not be available until the process had been completed, it said.

The health minister said the government felt confident a law could be drawn up within the bounds of the Constitution, citing a previous national mandate for smallpox that was passed in 1948.

The measures seemed designed to save another imperiled Christmas and ski season.

Roberto Burioni, a leading Italian virologist at San Raffaele University in Milan, said the explanation for Austria’s outbreak was “very simple: lower vaccination rates and less measures and it’s a period of the year when respiratory viruses spread.” He called the refusal of so many people in Austria to get vaccinated “really disappointing.”

Austria’s chancellor said that the lockdown, one of the first since the spring, will be evaluated after 10 days and will not extend beyond Dec. 13, to ensure that people would be able to celebrate Christmas and that stores would not lose out on holiday sales. But the country’s economy minister was already drafting a compensation package for some businesses.

Austria has registered 15,809 new coronavirus cases in the past 24 hours, according to figures released on Friday, straining the country’s health system, which has reached its limit. There was so far no indication of a new variant driving the infections. Instead the virus had found room to circulate among the country’s unvaccinated.

The unvaccinated had offered the virus, which fleetingly seemed beaten back, a toehold from which to spread back across the continent, epidemiologists say.

The low vaccination rates in Eastern Europe, such as in Romania and Bulgaria, have had disastrous consequences, with hospitalization rates as high there as at any time since the virus first erupted into view.

Italy, which shares a border with Austria, has attributed a spike in cases in its northern regions to contagion from the north. Those northern Italian regions have in recent days asked the national government to tighten restrictions against the unvaccinated, including a more robust health pass.

The current Italian health pass, known as the Green Pass, was until recently the toughest measure in Europe and was a prerequisite for work. It requires either vaccination, a swab every other day or recent recovery from Covid.

In recent weeks, regional presidents have floated proposals to apply any further restrictions exclusively to the unvaccinated.

Italian government officials said that for now, those proposals were not under serious consideration, but that a requirement for health professionals and care givers to get a booster shot was likely.

The government argued that the country’s early bold actions, after vigorous debate, have helped produce high vaccination rates that left it protected for the time being and allowed it to avoid measures like those in Austria.

But Alberto Cirio, the president of the northern region of Piedmont, said that in order to protect citizens who got vaccinated, listened to science and did their public duty, measures should be focused on punishing the unvaccinated.

He said lockdowns had been proven as effective tools, but told Italian television on Friday that the question was, “Who should we stop?” He said the answer was clearly the unvaccinated.

In Greece, where infections have spiked, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced on Thursday additional restrictions for the country’s unvaccinated population.

As of next Monday, access to more indoor spaces will be limited to the vaccinated, he said during a televised address. Proof of a negative test will no longer be sufficient for unvaccinated people to enter cinemas, theaters, museums and gymnasiums.

France has required people to show a vaccination certificate to enter public places such as theaters or museums and broadened the rule in August to include restaurants and long-distance trains. The Czech Republic, which has had the highest caseloads since the start of the pandemic, will on Monday ban people without a vaccination pass or proof of a previous Covid infection from its restaurants or bars or hair salons.

On Friday, the governor of Saxony, Germany’s hardest-hit state in the latest virus outbreak, announced new restrictions starting on Monday, including a ban on some events and larger gatherings regardless of the inoculation status of those attending. The governor, Michael Kretschmer, said that state lawmakers would approve the measures later Friday.

The level of politicization around Covid vaccines, which some far-right and populist groups have vehemently opposed, and a wariness about the novelty of the vaccines have fueled anti-vaccine skepticism.

Mr. Schallenberg, the Austrian chancellor, specifically called out the parties that gave succor to such skepticism, apparently referring to the far-right Freedom Party, which has already called for a demonstration to protest the new measure on Saturday.

“We have too many political forces in this country who vehemently and massively fight against this,” he said. “This is irresponsible. It is an attack on our health system. Goaded by these anti-vaxxers and from fake news, too many people among us have not been vaccinated. The consequence is overfilled intensive care stations and enormous human suffering. No one can want that.”

He added, “For a long time it was political consensus that we didn’t want a vaccine mandate, but we have to be realistic.”

Jason Horowitz reported from Rome, and Melissa Eddy from Berlin. Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin and Elian Peltier from Brussels.