Restrictions for unvaccinated people, for example for restaurants and events, are also being discussed in the neighboring country. However, the Austrian government continues to rely on education and low-threshold vaccination offers, it was said on Thursday at the APA. According to lawyers, special treatment of unvaccinated people would be possible in any case.
Education and vaccination offer
“We have worked out the openings that are currently possible together and now we have to stick to it together to maintain them. Our top priority at the moment must be to further increase the vaccination rate,” said a joint statement from the offices of Federal Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (VP) and Health Minister Wolfgang Mckstein (Greens). This should be achieved through “persuasion and good education” as well as “an uncomplicated, low-threshold vaccination offer”, as the federal states responsible have already demonstrated with numerous effective campaigns in the past few weeks. According to current data from AGES, the effectiveness of the vaccination is over 90 percent, enables more freedom and offers protection, the two advertised.
However, according to several lawyers, the restrictions for unvaccinated persons discussed in Germany would also be possible in Austria. According to Christoph Bezemek, Dean of the Faculty of Law in Graz, unequal treatment of vaccinated and unvaccinated people must of course be factually justified, as he emphasized in Thursday’s “Kurier”. The constitutional law experts Brigitte Hornyk and Heinz Mayer also share this assessment in the 1-midday journal.
Legal distinction between vaccinated and unvaccinated?
Vaccinated people could pass the virus on, but less often than people who were not vaccinated. In addition, according to the current state of knowledge, any illness is significantly milder and the hospitals are almost exclusively unvaccinated, argues Bezemek. If a lockdown is imposed again, from his point of view a differentiation between vaccinated and unvaccinated is constitutionally required. The argument goes that 100 percent of the population cannot be locked up for 20 percent of people who refuse to be vaccinated. In addition to objective justification, the prerequisite is, of course, that the regulation is not excessive, according to Hornyk. “Measures against unvaccinated people should not degenerate into punishment because the person concerned has not been vaccinated,” emphasizes Mayer.
