Health
Lauterbach: Delivery of monkeypox vaccine to Berlin
Health Minister Karl Lauterbach speaks of a “disproportionate burden” from monkeypox in Berlin. photo
© Bernd von Jutrczenka/dpa
Berlin is a monkeypox hotspot in Germany. Vaccine is scarce – the manufacturer is struggling with bottlenecks. The Minister of Health is now appealing to federal states with few cases to help out.
Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach has called on federal states with only a few cases of monkeypox to hand over vaccines to the state of Berlin. He would be happy if this vaccine “could be relocated to the focal point of Berlin, because we have a disproportionate burden here,” said the SPD politician. There are production bottlenecks at the manufacturer.
Germany bought 40,000 doses of vaccine directly from the manufacturer and received around 5,000 doses from EU quotas. You got more doses than any other European country.
The federal government has also ordered another 200,000 cans for Germany. These should arrive by early September at the latest. Lauterbach reported that the EU Commission had only ordered 70,000 vaccine doses for the whole of Europe.
The clinic director for infectiology at the Berlin University Hospital Charité, Leif Erik Sander, said that men who had sexual contact with other men were particularly affected. It is not yet certain how well the vaccine originally developed for smallpox protects against monkeypox. Sander advised reducing contacts.