The Galician Health Service, Sergas, has confirmed to this newspaper that this Thursday the 1st it will begin the extensive vaccination of monkeypox. Until last week, only 13 people from our community had received the vaccine when the positive cases amounted to 104. Given the limitations that have existed so far, from the LGTBIQ Center in Vigo they point out that there have been users, inhabitants of Galicia, who have gone to the Isabel Zendal Hospital in the Spanish capital to receive the vaccine.
For its director, Francisco Fernández, “vaccination in Galicia should have started earlier” and be more extensive.
In the case of Madrid, more than 4,400 vaccines have been administered when the confirmed cases are 2,355. In this community, the vaccine can be requested by telephone appointment.
In the case of Galicia, Sergas explains that this Thursday it will detail in the vaccination protocol the steps that people must follow. This document will be posted on the website of the Department of Health. “An expansion in the criteria for vaccination is planned in line with the Ministry’s recommendations,” say sources from the regional department.
They also point out that “the recruitment of candidates for this vaccination will be carried out by the Preventive Medicine teams of the different health areas, without prejudice to collaboration with other specific care units. Vaccination will take place in hospital centers.
As for the people who will be prioritized to be vaccinated, those in first place are those who are close contacts of cases. It should be emphasized that it is a post-exposure vaccination. The dose must be administered between the fourth and fourteenth day after being in contact with the person who tested positive.
The second prioritized group would be made up of people who were not close contacts but who present risk practices (pre-exposure vaccination). In this block, Sergas includes people who use PreP, pre-exposure prophylaxis, for HIV prevention.
PreP refers to medicines that reduce your chances of getting HIV through sex or injection drug use.
Both from the LGTBIQ Center and from the PVLSE association of Vigo they believe that the WHO is “stigmatizing” the LGTVIQ collective in relation to monkeypox when it is a disease that “is contracted by close physical contact”, exposure to saliva and secretions from the respiratory tract (droplets) by direct and prolonged face-to-face contact; or contact with objects contaminated by the virus (sex toys, towels, clothing…)
Let us remember that the World Health Organization even recommended –among other things– that “men who have sex with men reduce their number of sexual partners”.
For Francisco Fernández, something very similar to when HIV cases began to be known and spread. “So, it was called the cancer of homosexuals. Now, you see in the data that it affects a lot of heterosexual women,” he notes.
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