Austrians Could Face Jail Time For Refusing COVID Jabs
Last week, Austria made the decision to put unvaccinated people on full lockdown. They were prohibited from leaving their homes unless they had an essential reason to do so. Now, the Austrian government has announced full lockdown measures for the entire country which will last for approximately 20 days.
Furthermore, Austria has announced that they will make COVID vaccination a legal requirement starting February 1st. They are the first country in Europe to do this, and politicians in neighbouring Germany are currently debating similar measures as case counts continue to rise.
Citizens who refuse to comply could face hefty fines and even jail sentences if they refuse to pay, although it has been emphasized by Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg that the legal questions and details still need to be worked out.
A draft document about these new measures suggest fines could reach as high as $8,100 or several weeks behind bars.
Citizens will be summoned for vaccine appointments and should they not show up they will receive an official summons from local authorities. If a citizen still doesn't show up they will be summoned one more time within the next four weeks. If the second request is unanswered, the person would face a fine of €3,600 ($4,061) or four weeks in prison. Fines would increase to €7,200 ($8,000) for those who had already been fined twice for violating the vaccination requirement.
With the closure of all non-essential businesses and recreational facilities, tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands, protested in the capital Vienna ahead of the lockdown. This is something we've seen around the globe, with the extent of the protests being ignored by mainstream media but shared across social media platforms by thousands of people. It was recently reported that millions of people gathered across Australia to peacefully protest against mandatory vaccine measures, for example.
According to Schallenberg,
"For a long time the consensus in this country was that we don't want a vaccine mandate. In spite of months of persuasion, we have not managed to convince enough people to be vaccinated. Tightening vaccine pass controls and testing requirements had started to make a difference but it hasn't convinced enough. We don't want a fifth wave, we don't want a sixth or a seventh wave."
Austria is experiencing its most powerful wave of COVID, even higher than what they experienced prior to the rollout of vaccinations. There are currently 990 cases per 100,000 people. Last Friday Austria recorded 15,809 new infections. The country has the lowest vaccination rate in Europe, with 66% of its population being fully vaccinated.
The unvaccinated are being blamed for the outbreak, which has been a common theme around the world. But is this really a result of a failure to vaccinate, or a failing vaccine?
In Gibraltar, for example, 100 percent of those eligible are fully vaccinated yet they are experiencing an exponential rise in cases. This is something we've seen around the globe. In Ireland, which has 92 per cent of its eligible population covered, deaths and transmission rates from the virus have roughly doubled since August. Of the top five countries that have the highest percentage of population fully vaccinated (99.9–84.3%), the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identifies four of them as “high” transmission countries.
White House COVID adviser Anthony Fauci, MD, went on The New York Times‘ podcast The Daily and emphasized that deaths and hospitalizations are also increasing in the vaccinated. Although there is data from around the globe showing mostly unvaccinated people in hospitals and ICU's, this seems to be changing. Dr. Steven Pelech, a University of British Columbia, Canada immunologist, recently emphasized that more vaccinated people are ending up in hospitals and dying. In the UK, many hospitals are full of vaccinated people, as explained by Dr. Peter Doshi, a senior editor at the British Medical Journal and professor at the University of Maryland.
The data from Israel was also cited by Fauci in his interview with The Daily.
Here is more data showing that COVID is not a pandemic of the unvaccinated for those who are interested. A number of people are also concerned about the number of vaccine injuries being reported.
Dr. Günter Kampf, consultant hospital epidemiologist and Associate Professor for hygiene and environmental medicine at the University Medicine Greifswald, Germany, explains,
"High COVID-19 vaccination rates were expected to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in populations by reducing the number of possible sources for transmission and thereby to reduce the burden of COVID-19 disease. Recent data, however, indicate that the epidemiological relevance of COVID-19 vaccinated individuals is increasing."
If this is the case, why are unvaccinated people being stigmatized and in many cases punished by not being allowed to work or travel?
All of this begs the question, are COVID restrictions really about the pandemic, or is the pandemic being used and capitalized on by those who wish to expand their power and control? Should we really give governments the power to completely control the human race in ways they have during this pandemic?
"As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world. Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept?"
Update Dec 4, 2021: New details added regarding fine amounts and jail time.