The virus is spreading fast from the East into the German-speaking Europe. Turns out that for Alpine people, vaccines aren’t one of their favorite things.

(Originally published Nov. 12 in “What in the World“) While Eastern Europe’s plight at the hands of Covid has generated little media interest, Germany’s record-setting resurgence in infections has prompted widespread coverage of the seeming paradox. How can a nation with such a civically minded, law-abiding citizenry, that appears to value rationality over emotion, and that had seemingly subdued Covid to the extent that fastidious Singapore chose it as the first destination from which it would waive its quarantine requirements, have suffered such a dramatic relapse? German politicians are responding to the surge by weighing a revival of restrictions on movement and gatherings.

The immediate cause appears to be a diehard minority of anti-vaxxers who (along with Germany’s population of unvaccinated children) have kept the country’s vaccination rate at only about two-thirds of the population. This shortcoming alone serves as a troubling reminder that scientists now believe the Delta variant of the virus is so contagious that achieving herd immunity will require vaccination rates of at least 85%.

But Germany’s embarrassing relapse also challenges the stereotype of Germanic people as an emotionless race of über-efficient, hyper-rational automatons. As the Financial Times wrote this week, Austria and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland are also home to die-hard vaccine refuseniks who appear to be providing the fuel for dramatic increases in Covid infections there. It turns out Saxons can be yahoos, too, especially if they’re in rural, mountainous areas remote from the kind of information that dispels superstition and myth. Let’s not forget the Austrian who famously harnessed German stereotypes and myths to become the leader of one of the country’s rising political parties a hundred years ago.

And on the face of it, there does seem to be some basis for the FT’s generalization. German-speaking Europe has lower vaccination rates than their Latin neighbors. Things are so bad in Austria that its chancellor is considering imposing a lockdown on unvaccinated people there.

But whether this says more about national character or universal human psychology is another question. Northern Europe, for whatever reason, has suffered a lower total death toll than southern Europe. This means people in southern Europe are more likely to know someone killed by Covid, which is probably the best argument for vaccines there is. The kind of government mistrust informing vaccine reluctance to the north may be a luxury of those who haven’t yet seen firsthand what Covid will do if left unchecked.

Politico suggests similar distrust of the government is behind low vaccination rates in Eastern Europe. It’s easy to hypothesize that distrust of the government is widespread in the former Soviet bloc. In the democracies of German-speaking central Europe, we leap to dismiss the vaccination gap as the result of backward yokels hidden away in Alpine backwaters.

Discussions of the anti-vax minority also tend to overlook the large population of younger Covid carriers still ineligible for vaccines. Now that the U.S. has green-lighted jabs for 5-12 year-olds, nearly a million more Americans have this week already crossed over into the vax populi. Europe, it’s time to vaccinate die Kinder.