Austria has the right idea – put the unvaccinated in lockdown

Disturbing news from the province of Upper Austria. It has the unwelcome distinction of having the lowest vaccination rate and the highest infection rate of Austria’s nine provinces. Death rates are rising. As it happens, Austria also has the lowest vaccination rate of any western European country apart from Liechtenstein, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

I’m not quite sure why this relatively prosperous chunk of Europe displays such reluctance to take this basic public health precaution. Some say it is to do with the strength of the far-right Freedom Party, but there we are.

The regional government of Upper Austria, faced presumably with an iron curtain of anti-vaxxer resistance and a growing risk of wider illness and economic collapse, now wants to put the unvaccinated in lockdown. They believe, or hope, that it will help prevent spread of the disease – still potentially deadly and very much still with us, let’s not forget – and to protect the community. Vaccination rates in Austria are running at an inadequate rate of about 65 per cent, and in Upper Austria it’s under 60 per cent. As the provincial governor, Thomas Stelzer puts it: “I don’t see why two thirds should lose their freedom because one third is dithering.”

He is quite right, and it is a warning to the rest of Europe about what can befall a nation if a vaccination programme falters. Asking the unvaccinated to limit their travel and contact with others is one of the extreme measures that may have to be taken when health services start to collapse, and as winter draws in, that is becoming an increasing possibility across the continent.

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Britain was and is fortunate in having enjoyed such a successful vaccination drive, but now that immunity is waning it needs to be driven on with the same urgency as it was earlier this year. The sense of complacency, the idea that Covid is somehow behind us, is very worrying.

The lockdown of the unvaccinated is hardly an attractive option, or, in most respects, a fair one, but it is just the kind of emergency measure that would become an option – or be forced upon us – if, ironically enough, the senseless anti-vaxxer propaganda gets the kind of hold in this country that it seems to have in Austria and elsewhere.

Vaccination works against the spread of infection at the collective level, through the familiar operation of “herd immunity”, and it may also work at the individual level because it may make it less likely for people to be infected in the first place, and their individual infectiousness may be lower than in the unvaccinated.

Like the “no jab, no job” policy for the NHS and care homes, this isn’t, in Austria or elsewhere, about victimising people who refuse the vaccine, but trying to protect them, as well as the majority, from the consequences of their choices (leaving aside the small number who qualify for a medical vaccine exemption).

You’re free to be unvaccinated if you wish, but you cannot expect to place your life and others’ lives and health in jeopardy if you go out and about, and put yourself in a position to catch and spread the coronavirus. Vaccines are still our best wall of defence, and we can’t afford to have people punching big holes in it, allowing new variants to replicate, and risking plunging the whole country, vaccinated and unvaccinated alike, into another mandatory lockdown, with all the damage that entails.

I’ve met people who don’t believe in vaccines, for whatever reason, and I don’t feel any animosity towards them. Quite the opposite; I fear for their health (and mine, and, to be honest, am a bit wary of them in that sense). I don’t want to have their way of life constricted because I’ve nothing against them. Freedoms are sacred and should be inviolable, but that applies to all of us, and no man is an island, as they say. Freedoms can never be absolute in some purist sense, and are always balanced with responsibilities. Taking the vaccine is an act of personal and social responsibility, but it’s optional. In that situation, society has the right to defend the most fundamental human right of all – the right to life. We should all fear having to follow where Austria is going.