At the beginning of April it became known that a man in Saxony had apparently had himself vaccinated against Corona 87 times and sold the evidence.

The police are investigating him on suspicion of the unauthorized issuing of vaccination cards and forgery of documents.

Behavioral economist Katrin Schmelz suspects that such cases could increase if the Bundestag decides to make vaccination compulsory this Thursday.

Anna Lena Ripperger

Editor in Politics.

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Some of the previously unvaccinated will then be vaccinated because they have to.

“But there will be aggression.

And others will try to circumvent the obligation directly.” At the same time, a limit has now been reached for voluntary vaccinations.

Vaccination skepticism is not immutable

With her colleague Samuel Bowles from the Santa Fe Institute, Schmelz studied for the University of Konstanz’s Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” how people go from being skeptics to being pro-vaccination.

Between April 2020 and May 2021, they asked the same 2,000 adult Germans three times, among other things, to what extent they agreed to being vaccinated.

Your study shows: Vaccination skepticism is not immutable.

The majority of people who doubted the vaccination gave up their resistance at at least one point in the course of the pandemic.

Four factors are decisive: the pandemic situation, trust in the government measures and in the effectiveness of the vaccination, and the question of the restriction of freedom.

Those who have the feeling that the vaccination restricts their freedom tend to be against it, while those who hope that it will give them more freedom for themselves and others tend to be in favor, says Schmelz.

"If vaccination becomes mandatory during a phase of free life, the gain in freedom through vaccination of everyone naturally no longer plays a role," she adds, with a view to the end of almost all corona measures last weekend.

According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), 23.4 percent of the population were unvaccinated on Wednesday, 4.8 percent of them are children between the ages of zero and four for whom there is still no approved vaccine.

There are large differences in the vaccination rates within the age groups.

The group with the smallest vaccination gap is those over the age of 60, who are targeted by a proposal for compulsory vaccination by representatives of the SPD, Greens and FDP.

Low willingness to vaccinate among the unvaccinated

COSMO, a long-term study by the University of Erfurt, the RKI and other institutions, has investigated which factors besides age also play a role in the willingness to be vaccinated.

In an evaluation at the end of 2021, the research group points out “that people in eastern Germany tend to be unvaccinated, as well as people with a migration background, less education or people living in rural areas”.

However, psychological factors are more meaningful than sociodemographic factors.

The researchers go into this again in the evaluation of the last planned wave of surveys at the end of March and find that people who do not want to be vaccinated under any circumstances have much greater safety concerns than those who have been vaccinated and assess the risk from the disease as low - and therefore the vaccination is not necessary.

Those who were still hesitant were also primarily concerned about safety, but not as much as those who were reluctant.