Rarely has a European leader spelled out the continent’s Covid-19 strategy as bluntly as French President Emmanuel Macron, who said [recently]: “The unvaccinated, I really want to piss them off.”
The question facing the European Union is whether progressively excluding vaccine holdouts from work places and leisure spaces will be enough in the face of the Omicron variant to prevent a crisis in hospitals and avoid further lockdowns.
France, Germany, Italy and many other EU countries are pressuring unvaccinated adults to get inoculated by excluding them from more everyday activities, while stopping short of a universal vaccine mandate.
European arm-twisting contrasts with more laissez-faire approaches in the U.K. and U.S., but doesn’t satisfy public-health experts who say it would be more effective to make vaccination mandatory.
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The prevalent policy, however, is to accept that Omicron infections are inevitable, avoid sweeping closures, and try to stop people from getting badly ill via boosters for the vaccinated and pressure on the holdouts.
Most of Europe’s political class has so far stuck to the principle that vaccination should be voluntary—but that those who choose not to vaccinate should bear consequences.
