When a mobile team from the Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund arrived at a vocational school in Zittau in Eastern Saxony at the beginning of this week to vaccinate 150 registered students against the corona virus, a handful of vaccination opponents were already there.

They were posted at the entrance.

According to the Sächsische Zeitung, there was a riot when a woman screamed that everyone who had been vaccinated would soon die, and a man was brutalized against the vaccinator.

Stefan Locke

Correspondent for Saxony and Thuringia based in Dresden.

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The police were able to clarify the matter quickly, and they are now familiar with radical anti-vaccination agents.

However, the investigations are even more difficult after an arson attack on a vaccination center in Treuen in Vogtland, at the entrance to which three Molotov cocktails were smashed at the beginning of the week.

The damage remained minor.

But because a political background cannot be ruled out, the police terrorism and extremism defense center is now looking for the perpetrators.

In Saxony, a good half of all residents are vaccinated

Now, individual acts of violence are not the reason that the corona vaccination rates in eastern Germany are lower than in the west.

The problem mainly affects Saxony, but also Thuringia and regions of Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg.

It is particularly surprising that the quotas of East Germans for many other vaccinations are even higher than those of West Germans.

Only with Corona do gaps suddenly appear.

In Saxony, which has been at the bottom of the vaccination balance nationwide for months, just over half of all residents are fully vaccinated against Corona, even in Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg the rate is still below 60 percent - while it has long been above it in all western countries and at the front runner Bremen is even 75 percent.

What's going on there? A call to Raj Kollmorgen, sociologist at the Zittau-Görlitz University of Applied Sciences, who has the illustrative examples for this question practically on his doorstep. First of all, Kollmorgen also refers to the corona incidence values ​​that have been low in the region for months, which are still only a third of the values ​​in West Germany and have so far practically no longer required restrictions on public and private life. But with the end of the summer vacation and the beginning of autumn, the incidences there also rise again, which could soon make some who previously did not see the need for vaccination rethink. However, the memories of the turn of the year are still fresh for many. At that time, the central German states had the highest numbers of infections and deaths.

The real problem lies deeper, says Kollmorgen. It is part of a protest culture that has been gaining independence in rural areas for years. Regardless of whether refugees, climate change or now just Corona. "There is a fairly stable milieu that works itself out at every opportunity and supported by echo chambers in the social networks of the state and its institutions." Contradictions and irrational matters played no role, the main thing was "against".