Over 70,000 Germans took to streets to protest nationwide COVID-19 vaccine mandates

In what's become a weekly event, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets across Germany to vent their frustrations over the country’s increasingly restrictive coronavirus measures, Deutsche Welle reported.

According to German police data, upwards of 70,000 people attended rallies in Berlin, Cologne, Cottbus and Rostock — as well as several other locations across Germany —often brandishing signs and banners to show their disapproval of the possible vaccine mandate recently announced by Berlin.

Although most of the protests were peaceful, several were broken up by police because they were not properly registered or because demonstrators refused to abide by health and safety requirements.

According to police data, the Free State of Thuringia saw the largest protests and some 21,000 individuals took to the streets. Meanwhile, Police in Berlin estimated that about 3,000 protestors marched on major landmarks including the Brandenburg Gate.

Protesters are particularly opposed to the potential prospect of obligatory vaccination for all in Germany.

Speaking to that point, however, German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach suggested that such a route could be preferable to a renewed lockdown in the coming months.

"I would prefer that we protect [the unvaccinated] with a general obligation to be vaccinated, rather than with restrictions for everybody in the spring," he noted. 

One banner in Berlin described the crowd as a gathering of "the vaccinated and the unvaccinated opposed to compulsory vaccination," while another said "whoever sleeps in a democracy wakes up in a dictatorship."

"Merkel, Spahn, Steinmeier, Drosten to jail" could be heard on the streets of Berlin — referring to the former chancellor, former health minister, current president and a prominent German virologist. 

Yet although the spread of the omicron variant has led to a surge in new cases across Germany, hospitalization and death rates have remained low.