VIENNA (Reuters) -More than 40,000 folks marched by Vienna on Saturday to protest against a lockdown and plans to make vaccinations obligatory to curb the coronavirus pandemic.
Faced with a surge in infections, the federal government final month made Austria the primary nation in Western Europe to reimpose a lockdown and mentioned it might make vaccinations obligatory from February.
People carried indicators saying: “I’ll determine for myself”, “Make Austria Great Again”, and “New Elections” – a nod to the political turmoil that has seen three chancellors inside two months – as crowds gathered.
“I’m right here as a result of I’m against against pressured vaccinations. I’m for human rights, and the violation of human rights must be stopped,” one protester instructed Reuters Television.
“We are defending our youngsters,” mentioned one other.
Around 1,200 law enforcement officials deployed to deal with scattered protests that merged right into a march on the central Ring boulevard.
Police put the scale of the protest at over 40,000, whereas round 1,500 staged counterprotests.
Officers used pepper spray against some protesters who aimed fireworks at police, and detained some marchers, police mentioned.
A parliamentary committee this week permitted doubling the size of the lockdown to twenty days, which the federal government has mentioned is the longest it should final.
Austria, a rustic of 8.9 million folks, has reported https://covid19-dashboard.ages.at/?l=en almost 1.2 million coronavirus instances and extra than 12,000 COVID-19-linked deaths because the pandemic started final yr.
New instances have been falling because the begin of the lockdown, whose phrases make exception for protests.
(Reporting by Francois Murphy and Lisi Niesner; Writing by Michael Shields; Editing by Alex Richardson)
