Gay community urges rapid approval of monkeypox vaccines

Gay men are at most risk of infection for monkeypox. The WHO is urging them to reduce sexual partners at least for now. Keystone / Michael Buholzer

The gay community in Switzerland is urging the federal government to act quickly and approve vaccines for monkeypox.

In Zurich, for example, a medical centre for the LGBT+ community has been diagnosing between three and five monkeypox infections a day for several weeks. Checkpoint Zurich wants the authorities to make available the new generation vaccine against the classic form of smallpox, which is also used against monkeypox. This is authorised in the European Union but not yet approved in non-EU Switzerland.

“Many of our clients go to neighbouring countries like Germany or France to get vaccinated, and we feel that it shouldn’t be like that,” Checkpoint co-director and infectious disease specialist Benjamin Hampel told Swiss public television, RTSExternal link, on Thursday. “Switzerland has a fantastic health system, we should be able to offer this vaccine.”

There are now 251 confirmed cases of monkeypox in Switzerland, more than 100 of which are in canton Zurich. The gay community is particularly vulnerable to infection.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Saturday declared the disease a global public health emergency, its highest level of alert. On Wednesday the WHO advised the group most affected by the disease – men who have sex with men – to reduce the number of their sexual partners.

‘Not a pandemic threat’

However, monkeypox is “not a pandemic threat like AIDS”, infectious diseases specialist Pietro Vernazza told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) newspaper in an interviewExternal link on Friday. The former chief physician of the Clinic for Infectious Diseases in St Gallen lists some essential differences.

Monkeypox is not transmitted when the infected person does not yet show symptoms such as pustules. “So infected people know they are contagious,” he said. Also, people with monkeypox are not contagious for long, and “once the pustules heal, the person is immune”.

With HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, visible symptoms do not usually appear until years after infection, but infected people are already contagious before that, Vernazza said.