Vienna Brothel Offered Free Session to People Who Got Vaccinated

Originally published 2021-11-12.

A woman in a nurse costume holds an oversized syringe beside the door marked “Impfstrasse” (vaccination street), shown next to a heart-shaped neon sign, the image used by media covering the offer in November 2021.

In November 2021 a brothel in Vienna called Fun Palast opened a Covid-19 vaccination station on its premises and offered anyone who got a jab there a voucher for a free 30-minute visit to its "sauna club". The offer made headlines around the world, but behind the joke-worthy story was a serious problem: Austria had one of the lowest vaccination rates in Western Europe and was heading into a severe winter wave.

Here is what the venue offered, why it did so, what happened in Austria in the weeks that followed, and what research says about whether unusual incentives like this actually persuade people to get vaccinated.

What the brothel offered

Fun Palast set up what it called a vaccination street, staffed for jabs on Monday evenings from 4 pm to 11 pm. Anyone who was vaccinated there received a voucher for a free half-hour session in the club's sauna area with a companion of their choice. The club also allowed teenagers over 14 to be vaccinated there if they came with a supervising adult; the voucher, of course, was aimed only at adult customers.

The story was first widely shared by Sky News, whose post about it is below.

A brothel in Vienna is providing #COVID19 vaccinations and giving those who take up the offer vouchers for a free visit.

In exchange for a jab, visitors get a free 30-minute session in a "sauna club" with the "lady of their choice".

Read more: https://t.co/aAZPnb5d8m pic.twitter.com/Eywp3yONRD

— Sky News (@SkyNews) November 9, 2021

According to the venue, the scheme proved popular in its first weeks. Being vaccinated also had a practical benefit for customers: under the rules then in force, proof of vaccination was needed to enter entertainment venues, so a jab meant they could legally visit the club again.

Why a brothel got into vaccination

Two motives were at work. The first was business. Like bars, restaurants and clubs, Austria's brothels had been shut for months during the pandemic. They were allowed to reopen in July 2020, but trade remained well below normal, and each new restriction cut it further.

The second was reach. Manager Peter Laskaris told Sky News that the club's clientele included a group the public health campaign was struggling to reach. In his words, "very many men with a migration background, virtually refuse vaccination or don't even know that you can be vaccinated." Whatever one makes of that generalisation, the idea of taking vaccines to places where hesitant people already spend time, instead of waiting for them to come to a clinic, was one that health authorities in many countries tried in 2021, with pop-up sites in mosques, churches, shopping centres and sports grounds.

A worker at the club, identified only as Mina, told reporters she liked the idea because it fitted the venue's name and helped bring life a little closer to normal.

Austria's situation in November 2021

The offer appeared at a tense moment. Austria's vaccination rate lagged behind much of Western Europe, at roughly two-thirds of the population fully vaccinated, and case numbers were climbing fast. In early November the government restricted access to restaurants, bars, hotels and venues to people who were vaccinated or had recently recovered from Covid-19.

Events then moved quickly:

• 15 November 2021: a lockdown took effect for unvaccinated people aged 12 and over, who could leave home only for work, essential shopping or emergencies.
• 22 November 2021: with the fourth wave still rising, a full national lockdown for everyone began, planned for 20 days.
• The same announcement said Covid-19 vaccination would become a legal requirement from 1 February 2022, making Austria one of the first countries in Europe to plan a general vaccine mandate.

The mandate did take effect on paper in early 2022, but it was suspended within weeks as the milder Omicron variant spread, and it was later scrapped without ever being enforced. By then most remaining restrictions had already been lifted in March 2022.

How sex work is regulated in Austria

Readers outside Europe are sometimes surprised that a brothel could run a public health campaign at all. In Austria, selling sex is legal and regulated rather than banned. Sex workers are treated as self-employed, pay tax and are covered by social insurance, and they must undergo regular medical checks. Pimping and profiting from another person's sex work remain crimes, and each of Austria's federal states sets its own rules about where and how venues may operate.

That framework is part of why the story was possible: Fun Palast was a licensed business operating under the same Covid-19 entry rules as other venues, which is why it could add a vaccination point to its premises at all.

Did vaccine incentives work?

Fun Palast was far from the only organisation to try a creative reward. Around the world, people were offered free beer, doughnuts, sports tickets, cash and lottery entries for getting vaccinated. Romania even offered jabs to tourists visiting Bran Castle, the so-called Dracula's Castle.

The best-studied example is Ohio's Vax-a-Million lottery in 2021, which gave away $1 million a week to vaccinated adults and university scholarships to vaccinated teenagers. The research is mixed. A Boston University study in JAMA concluded that lotteries like this were of limited value in raising uptake. A later Harvard analysis estimated that the lottery prompted around 114,000 extra vaccinations, at about $49 per person vaccinated.

The broad lesson from that work is that rewards can nudge people who are undecided or simply have not got around to it, but they rarely change the minds of people who are firmly opposed. Making vaccination convenient, close by and familiar, which is what a venue-based clinic does, often matters as much as the prize.

Why the story still gets attention

Part of the appeal was simple surprise: a business associated with risk offering a health service. But the episode also captured how far Austria's pandemic rules reached into everyday life in late 2021, and how businesses hit hard by closures looked for any way to bring customers back. Whether you see it as clever outreach or a cheeky publicity grab, it remains one of the more memorable footnotes of the vaccination campaign.

Anyone unsure about which vaccines are recommended for them today can talk to a doctor or pharmacist.

Sources: IFLScience (reporting on Sky News coverage, November 2021); Wikipedia: COVID-19 pandemic in Austria; Wikipedia: Prostitution in Austria; Wikipedia: Vax-a-Million.