Effectiveness of Austrian Vaccination Mandate

As predicted, the Austrian vaccination mandate has been less than effective. Forcing people to take the mystery serum did not produce a rush to vaccination centers. The opposite happened. There are hardly no newcomers to the vaccination roadshow. Almost everyone taking the vaccine are booster groupies.

Assuming that the booster uptake is at about 80% for those already vaccinated, we can predict that only about 50% of Austrians will be freshly vaccinated within a year from now, and that number will fall to about 30% by the time the mandate is up for review in two years from now.

Politicians don't generally care much about the people they pretend to serve, but they do care about re-election, and my guess is therefore that they will want to be seen as representatives of the 70% who'll be officially unvaccinated in two years from now. That means that the mandate is already a zombie, and a giant albatross around the neck of anyone seen overly keen to implement it.

Eva Maria Holzleitner

By SPÖ Presse und Kommunikation - Tagung SPÖ Parlamentsklub, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link