Covid Live Updates: Vaccine Mandates and Booster News

Image

Rioters set fires on the streets of Rotterdam and attacked police officers at a demonstration against Covid measures in the Netherlands on Friday night. Austria was bracing for protests on Saturday, a day after announcing a nationwide lockdown and plan to make coronavirus vaccinations compulsory. And protests were planned in Germany, Italy and Switzerland.

A year and a half after the coronavirus swept through Europe with devastating effect, prompting strict lockdowns, the continent is once again the epicenter of the pandemic. And as governments increasingly return to measures limiting public life and introduce vaccination requirements, protests pushing back against those rules are also rising.

With infections soaring and antiviral drugs to treat the coronavirus not yet available, governments have doubled down on calls for people to get vaccinated, including with booster shots. They have also shifted from voluntary measures to mandatory ones as they lose patience with people who are resisting inoculation.

Frustration among members of the public also appears to be growing on both sides. Although recent anti-vaccine protests have fizzled in countries like France and Italy, they have flared up in the Netherlands, where a three-week partial lockdown is in place in an attempt to quell a fourth wave of coronavirus infections.

On Friday night, police officers in Rotterdam fired warning shots and used water canons against hundreds of protesters who were demonstrating over the country’s pandemic restrictions. Seven people were injured and dozens were arrested amid what the city’s mayor, Ahmed Aboutaleb, described as “an orgy of violence.”

In Austria’s capital, Vienna, thousands were expected to protest on Saturday over a vaccination mandate that is set to come into force in February and a nationwide lockdown that begins on Monday.

Those actions, which were announced on Friday and would have widely been considered unthinkable just months ago, are the strongest recent measures taken in a Western democracy to tame the pandemic. Austria’s populist Freedom Party, which called for Saturday’s protests, compared them to the type of rules imposed in a dictatorship.

Neighboring Germany, where case numbers have soared in recent weeks, largely among children and teenagers and unvaccinated adults, will also see lockdowns in some of the states with the highest numbers of infection. Already restrictions are in place for the unvaccinated.

As to whether a general lockdown could be reinstated in the country, the acting health minister, Jens Spahn, said on Friday that “nothing should be ruled out.”

Portugal may also face new lockdown restrictions, its prime minister said on Friday, and the Czech Republic, which is facing its highest caseload since the pandemic began, will require proof of vaccination or recent recovery from the virus for entry into restaurants, bars and hair salons starting on Monday.

In the Netherlands, the government has said it wants to introduce a law allowing businesses to exclude unvaccinated people, even if they test…