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Covid vaccinations possible in Vienna from Monday without appointment

From Monday, July 5th, vaccinations will be available in the Austrian capital of Vienna without an appointment.

Published: 2 July 2021 18:46 CEST
Updated: 5 July 2021 10:21 CEST

Covid vaccinations possible in Vienna from Monday without appointment

Photo: THOMAS KIENZLE / AFP

The vaccines will be available in the Austria Centre in Vienna.

The vaccine administered will be that from AstraZeneca.

Vienna city councillor for health Peter Hacker said the campaign will run until Sunday the 11th of July.

Immunity: How long are vaccinations valid for in Austria?

Hacker said the campaign would be accompanied by a shortening of the period required between doses and was motivated by a desire to stop the Delta variant in its tracks.

“After the vaccine from AstraZeneca has also proven to be very effective against the Delta variant of the coronavirus, the National Vaccination Board has recommended a shortening of the interval between the two vaccinations from twelve to four weeks,” Hacker said.

“This recommendation will also be followed to limit the Delta mutation in Vienna as little as possible.”

The campaign is open to anyone over the age of 18 who has not been vaccinated. Up to 1,500 people can be vaccinated per day.

Anyone interested can check ahead on the Austria Centre website to see how busy the centres are at that time.

In a bid to encourage vaccination, other tactics are being used in Vienna.

Young people in Vienna who attended a “vaccination party” on the Badeschiff at Schwedenplatz in late June were able to talk to the Health Minister Wolfgang Mückstein (Greens) about their vaccination concerns, and were given the chance to get a Johnson and Johnson vaccine while listening to live music.

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Vienna Festival director Milo Rau hits back at anti-Semitism accusations

As the conflict in Gaza sharply polarises opinion, “we must be inflexible” in defending the free exchange of ideas and opinions, the acclaimed Swiss director told AFP in an interview this week.

“I’m not going to take a step aside… If we let the antagonism of the war and of our society seep into our cultural and academic institutions, we will have completely lost,” said the 47-year-old, who will inaugurate the Wiener Festwochen, a festival of theatre, concerts, opera, film and lectures that runs until June 23rd in the Austrian capital and that has taken on a more political turn under his tenure.

The Swiss director has made his name as a provocateur, whether travelling to Moscow to stage a re-enactment of the trial of Russian protest punk band Pussy Riot, using children to play out the story of notorious Belgian paedophile Marc Dutroux, or trying to recruit Islamic State jihadists as actors.

Completely ridiculous

The Vienna Festival has angered Austria’s conservative-led government — which is close to Israel — by inviting Greek former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and French Nobel Prize winner for literature Annie Ernaux, both considered too critical of Israel.

A speech ahead of the festival on Judenplatz (Jews’ Square) by Israeli-German philosopher Omri Boehm — who has called for replacing Israel with a bi-national state for Arabs and Jews — also made noise.

“Who will be left to invite? Every day, there are around ten articles accusing us of being anti-Semitic, saying that our flag looks like the Palestinian flag, completely ridiculous things,” Rau said, as he worked from a giant bed which has been especially designed by art students and installed at the festival office.

Hamas’ bloody October 7th assault on southern Israel and the devastating Israeli response have stoked existing rancour over the Middle East conflict between two diametrically opposed camps in Europe.

In this climate, “listening to the other side is already treachery,” lamented the artistic director.

“Wars begin in this impossibility of listening, and I find it sad that we Europeans are repeating war at our level,” he said.

As head of also the NTGent theatre in the Belgian city of Ghent, he adds his time currently “is divided between a pro-Palestinian country and a pro-Israeli country,” or between “colonial guilt” in Belgium and “genocide guilt” in Austria, Adolf Hitler’s birthplace.

Institutional revolution

The “Free Republic of Vienna” will be proclaimed on Friday as this year’s Vienna Festival celebrates. according to Rau, “a second modernism, democratic, open to the world” in the city of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and artist and symbolist master Gustav Klimt.

Some 50,000 people are expected to attend the opening ceremony on the square in front of Vienna’s majestic neo-Gothic town hall.

With Rau describing it as an “institutional revolution” and unlike any other festival in Europe, the republic has its own anthem, its own flag and a council made up of Viennese citizens, as well as honorary members, including Varoufakis and Ernaux, who will participate virtually in the debates.

The republic will also have show trials — with real lawyers, judges and politicians participating — on three weekends.

Though there won’t be any verdicts, Rau himself will be in the dock to embody “the elitist art system”, followed by the republic of Austria and finally by the anti-immigrant far-right Freedom Party (FPOe), which leads polls in the Alpine EU member ahead of September national elections.

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