The free clinic – the first of its kind in the province – started on Thursday. Individuals can make appointments until October 6. The province said it is working to establish more vaccination sites elsewhere in the province. Abby Ferguson, executive director of the Halifax center, said there was an outstanding demand for the vaccine with about 430 appointments booked by 3:30 p.m. on the day of release. Ferguson told CBC Radio’s Mainstreet NS guest host Carolyn Ray that while she was too busy organizing the clinic to promote it, community partners got the message. This is a condensed version of their conversation that has been edited for clarity and length. Mainstreet NS7:21 Nova Scotia’s first monkeypox clinic opens in Halifax The first monkeypox pre-exposure vaccine clinic opened at the Halifax Sexual Health Center on Thursday for people most at risk of exposure to the virus. The clinic will have appointments until October 6. The center’s executive director tells guest Carolyn Ray 430 people made appointments for a vaccine on launch day alone. Abbey Ferguson, executive director of the Halifax Sexual Health Centre, says they booked 430 vaccination appointments on launch day. (Carolyn Ray/CBC) Who is eligible to make an appointment for the smallpox vaccine right now? At this time you can be vaccinated if you have not received a dose from somewhere else. So if you didn’t go to Toronto or Montreal to get one. You must identify as either a cis or trans queer man, a two-spirit person, or a non-binary person who has sex with queer men, two-spirit people, or non-binary people. [There are] a few caveats to this. You must have had two or more sexual partners in the last three months or plan to have one. have been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted infection in the past three months; if you have attended, worked, or volunteered at a place for sexual contact — such as a bathhouse or sex club in the past three months — or plan to go in the future. if you have had anonymous sex in the last three months, or plan to do so, or if you engage in sex work as both an employee and a client, or plan to do so. If you are having sex with anyone who meets these criteria, you are also eligible. Is this just one vaccine at this time or is it a two component vaccine? Right now we’re only doing one shot. Why is it important to have this access in Nova Scotia? We don’t have any community broadcasts at the moment, which is really great news and kind of unexpected. This is the best time to offer a pre-exposure prophylaxis. The whole idea is that you are [preventing it], so you don’t need to treat later. This is the perfect time to get some prevention and hopefully ensure this lack of community transmission in Nova Scotia. There has been concern that people in the LGBTQ+ community are stigmatized when it comes to monkeypox. How will you ensure that this does not happen? The specific name in the LGBTQ community for this vaccine is because it follows epidemiology. We see this demographic in infection rates in Canada. Now, as with STDs in general, which we talk about all the time, we know it doesn’t work that way. People can have sex with many different people and the real virus doesn’t care about their identity that way. Right now we’re just targeting demographics. Also, the reason the vaccine is handled in our clinic, or the rationale, is that we are a culturally competent clinic. We have strong ties and employees who are recognized as part of this community. We can use this language and our knowledge of how to discuss stigma. And any immunizer we have comes from [Nova Scotia Health Authority] has received a wealth of resources on our values and how we talk about stigma here at the clinic. How much monkeypox vaccine do you have? I was told we can get almost what we think we will need. At the moment, this means that we have six immunizers working, on average, for three evenings a week and two full days at the weekend, and we can get all those doses, without a problem. What did it take to get this clinic up and running in just a few weeks, did you have to hire more staff? We don’t need to hire more staff. For real immunizers, the majority will be our staff. But public health has provided us with some nurses to help us and make sure we use all the rooms to the best of our ability to increase capacity. Otherwise, it’s been my whole life for the past three weeks. What do people need to know about how to make an appointment or if they want to read these criteria as the list is quite long? You can go to novascotia.ca/monkeypox which has lots of information as well as a link at the bottom to “book now”. The actual booking is done through CANImmunize, which will look very familiar to anyone who has booked their own COVID-19 vaccine. [It] it is going to ask you very similar questions like your name and phone number, your e-mail, your health card number. You can book yourself online, but if you don’t have a health card or have an out-of-province health card, you can call us directly at the Halifax Sexual Health Center and we can book you in. MORE TOP STORIES
