Austrian Public Television Raffles Cars and Houses to Promote COVID-19 Vaccination

The Austrian public broadcaster, the ORF, has launched a lottery to help raise the still insufficient percentage of the population vaccinated against COVID-19, with prizes including up to a single family home and an electric car.

“Who gets vaccinated, wins” is the slogan of the initiative with which 1,000 prizes will be raffled among all those over 18 years of age residing in the country who have been immunized, or are going to do so, between October 1 and December 20, with some of the four vaccines authorized by the European Union.

This draw is part of the campaign to encourage the 34% of Austrians who have not yet vaccinated to get vaccinated, which places the country with the lowest immunization quota in Western Europe.

That is one of the reasons, according to experts, that Austria is currently among the countries with the highest infection rate at seven days in the world.

The hospitality, gastronomy, leisure, culture and non-essential commerce sectors closed yesterday for 20 days to reduce infections, and the Government has announced that vaccination will be mandatory from next February.

The ORF has justified the draw in that education and information are sometimes not enough to convince of the importance of getting vaccinated to fight the pandemic.

The Austrian government has been putting pressure on the unvaccinated for weeks.

Since the 8th, the prohibition of access to leisure and gastronomy venues was in force, and a week later a confinement was imposed only for them, which will continue when the current restriction on the entire population ends. Those restrictions have hardly increased the rate of immunization.

In the last two weeks, only 16,700 first doses have been injected each day on average, three times less than third doses, which in Austria can already be received by all adults who have been on the full initial regimen for more than four months. (I)