Alternative Medicine
The far-right in Austria is propelling the corona-skeptic movement forward, but the country's love of non-Western medicine may also explain low vaccine take-up
Servus!
Police in Styria estimated that as many as 30,000 people gathered in Graz on Saturday to protest against the country’s latest round of coronavirus countermeasures: the fourth national lockdown and the impending vaccine mandate due to come into effect on February 1, 2022. The demonstration proceeded peacefully for the most part, though 159 citations were issued by police against those who violated Austria’s mask mandate; 3 men are currently under suspicion of having made the Hitler salute. Smaller protests against the vaccine mandate also took place over the weekend in Klagenfurt, Innsbruck, and St. Pölten.
A slim majority of Austrians support the incoming vaccine mandate, one likely to be enforced by large fines for those who do not comply. 50 percent of Austrians told the polling firm Unique Research that they either strongly or somewhat support a vaccine mandate, while 36 percent said that they do not. That minority, however, is becoming ever louder and their presence on the streets is evermore perceptible. The far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ)—the hand behind many of the demonstrations across Austria—is planning another large gathering in Vienna this weekend.
The thrust of Austria’s corona-skeptic movement is far-right, and the majority of those who partake in corona-skeptic demonstrations either belong to or are attracted to the far-right. According to a study conducted by the University of Vienna and Vienna’s Sigmund Freud University, 57 percent of participants in corona-skeptic protests would vote for the FPÖ in the next parliamentary elections. Both the FPÖ and the new MFG Party are openly corona-and/or vaccine-skeptic, while from its inception, the corona-skeptic movement has attracted identitarians and neo-Nazis, Reichsbürger and other Querdenker and right-wing extremists. One need not look very hard to find evidence of antisemitism or Holocaust minimization at corona-skeptic protests.
The far-right in Austria is propelling the corona-skeptic movement forward, but it alone is not quite enough to explain why vaccine take-up in the country remains below the European Union average in spite of a recent uptick in vaccinations. As I alluded to in a recent op-ed for the Guardian, important too is Austria’s toxic relationship with alternative medicine: a perceptible current in Austrian life which expresses skepticism towards actual Western medicine and the medical establishment and fascination with homeopathy and plant-based remedies, traditional Chinese medicine, home remedies and old wives’ tales.
Austria is a country where the health minister is at once a registered GP and a trained practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine. It is a country where plant-based cures are prescribed on the public health system, and homeopathic pills and creams are advertised on primetime television without warnings or caveats. It is a country where homeopathy is recognized as a legitimate practice by the Austrian Medical Association and the study of homeopathy was reintroduced at Vienna’s Medical University in summer 2019 having originally been removed from its regular program of study in fall 2018.
A recent report in the Standard attempted to explain this widespread tolerance of alternative medicine in Austria and its relationship to vaccine skepticism. Part of it has to do with a certain kind of green politics which rubbishes biotechnology and genetic engineering including genetically-modified foodstuffs. The road from that worldview—one which may also incorporate vague forms of mysticism—to anti-vaxx ideas is a short one. The use of alternative over Western medicine and vaccine rejectionism are also relates to ideas of bodily autonomy and whether the state has the right to tell a person what to do with their body. And part of it may also have something to do with Austria’s Nazi past, namely the Nazi regime’s condemnation and liquidation of the “Judaized medical establishment,” as they termed it, a void in Austrian life and science that was never to be refilled.
Bis bald!
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