600 Austrian law enforcement officers have written to the Austrian Interior Minister, requesting that proposals for forced vaccination be withdrawn and that prejudice against the unvaccinated be ended.
The letter, written on January 10, was signed by three law enforcement personnel who purport to representing nearly 600 of their coworkers and was written to Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner.
“We do not want to face the population in a threatening manner during what are predominantly peaceful demonstrations which were organized due to the increasing dissatisfaction of the people with politicians,” wrote the authors of the letter.
Numerous protests were held around Austria last weekend, which would include Vienna, wherein approximately 20,000 protesters came to the streets on Saturday to denounce proposals to declare vaccination mandatory for all citizens over the age of 18.
In response to the letter, the Austrian Ministry of the Interior stated that “the people who signed [it] can be assigned a clear political orientation.”
“85% of the 32,000 Austrian police officers have already been vaccinated, that is a clear statement,” the ministry added.
The letter’s authors, on the other hand, refuted this, claiming that they are not affiliated with any political party.
“We are not far-right or far-left extremists, we are not anti-vaxxers … we are a group of several hundred police officers from the whole of Austria … united by our concern for the rule of law, freedom of thought, our fundamental rights, as well as our health,” they wrote.
The authors then issued a series of demands on Interior Minister Karner, the first of which was for him to “ensure that no vaccine mandate, either professional or general, or any other form of indirect forced vaccination be introduced in Austria.”
They subsequently requested that the so-called 3G policy at work be suspended, which restricts accessibility to only those who have gotten immunized against COVID-19, have tested negative for it, or having healed from the disease. Alternatively, the authors advocated for the rule’s abolition or modification into a 1G rule requiring simply a negative test for everybody to assure that “discrimination against unvaccinated colleagues comes to an end.”
Ultimately, the writers requested that they be regarded as allies rather than adversaries of the public.
“We want to be there for the people, as friend and helper,” they wrote.
Since proposals for obligatory vaccination were disclosed, anti-vaccine rallies have been occurring every Saturday in Austria, and they have been mostly peaceful, with only a few incidents of clashes involving policemen and protesters.