Mandate Awaits Fate
Austria's vaccine mandate continues to face a number of political and logistical hurdles before it comes into effect at the beginning of February
Servus!
On Sunday, the reality of what Austria’s forthcoming COVID-19 vaccine mandate will look like was presented to the general public. According to the government’s draft legislation, which passed parliament’s subcommittee on health on Monday, the mandate will apply to all those over the age of 18—not 14 as originally planned. Exemptions will apply to pregnant persons as well as those unable to get vaccinated on medical grounds. Those who have contracted and subsequently recovered from COVID-19 will also be exempt from the law for the first six months after their initial infection.
The mandate will be introduced in phases. During the initial introductory period from the beginning of February until March 15, every household will receive a letter in the mail informing them about the mandate. Only from March 16 on will the mandate be enforced and monitored, with authorities carrying out spot checks in the course of their regular work. Those found to be unvaccinated will be served notice and fined. During this phase, an unvaccinated person cannot be fined more than four times in a calendar year, according to the legislation.
Should the state deem it necessary on epidemiological grounds—which is to say, should the vaccine mandate not have its desired effect on vaccine uptake1—the legislation allows room for a third phase of the mandate. This would constitute a ratcheting up of pressure on the unvaccinated. All those who remain unvaccinated would have an appointment to get the jab made for them. Those who fail to show up for that appointment would be subject to a fine of up to €3,600. In this phase, no individual can be fined more than twice in a calendar year. Chancellor Karl Nehammer—recently recovered from COVID-19—said Sunday he hoped this third phase would prove unnecessary.
While other nations continue to contemplate a vaccine mandate—politicians in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Indonesia, Italy, and the UK have all discussed a possible mandate in one way or another—Austria remains a world leader, if you like, in seeking to impose a broad mandate on all its residents. In principle, according to a recent paper authored by Jeff King, Octávio Luiz Motta Ferraz, and Andrew Jones and published in the Lancet, there should be no major legal hurdle for Austria’s vaccine mandate to overcome, for such mandates in principle to not “violate human rights…as a matter of international and comparative constitutional law”:
There is a compelling rights-based case for a state duty to consider adopting mandatory vaccination, defined as any law that makes vaccination compulsory, or any public or private vaccination requirement for accessing a venue or service that cannot be avoided without undue burden. … As far as we know, no major constitutional or international court has found that a mandatory vaccination policy violates any general right to liberty.
Yet the mandate faces a number of other challenges political and logistic. On the latter, the CEO of ELGA, Franz Leisch, announced at the beginning of January that he did not believe the mandate could come into force until April 1. ELGA is responsible for managing Austria’s electronic vaccination certificate system and, said Leisch, at present the technology for an effective vaccine mandate simply isn’t ready. The government should offer incentives to people to get vaccinated until such a time as the mandate can be properly monitored and enforced, Leisch concluded.
And while the draft legislation is expected to pass parliament on Thursday with broad support from both governing and opposition factions (excluding the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), of course), in reality parties on the left, right, and center of the political debate are divided over the mandate. It has been the subject of internal criticism within the Greens, Burgenland’s social democratic governor Hans Peter Doskozil has called for a rethink on the mandate, and the NEOS spokesperson on the pandemic Gerald Loacker has said he won’t vote for it in parliament. From the government’s point-of-view, anything other than broad, cross-party support would hobble the mandate before it could come into force.
Bis bald!
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Stopp Corona Stopped
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Gernot’s New Gig
Former finance minister Gernot Blümel has landed a new job as CEO of the Superfund Group. Blümel, who left frontline politics in December 2021 in order to spend more time with his family, will oversee a Vienna-based asset management company with offices in Chicago, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Vienna, Warsaw, Grenada, and Zürich.
As of January 18, more than 75 percent of Austrians have now received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.