A Covid-19 vaccination team in the hospital shows up in an emergency to vaccinate employees who did not receive their shots.
The team only finds a few and will leave when an ER doctor suggests giving the remaining doses to vulnerable patients or non-hospital staff. The team refuses, saying it would violate hospital policy and state guidelines.
Inflamed the doctor works in the hospital until he finds an administrator who gives the OK for the team to use the rest of the doses.
But by the time the doctor finds the medical team, the move is over and according to protocol, the doses that are now left are now in the trash.
Isolated incident? No chance, said dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told NBC News.
“These kinds of things are pretty unbridled,” Jha said. ‘I have personally heard such stories from dozens of doctor friends in different states. Hundreds, if not thousands of doses are thrown across the country daily. It’s amazing. ”
Jha said the ER doctor whose story he told in a Twitter thread asked not to be identified this week, but his story, seen by thousands of people, resonated with other medical professionals who are frustrated by rules and regulations that they say make it harder to get more Americans vaccinated.
Why is this happening? Covid-19 vaccines have a short shelf life once thawed for use, Jha said. And because of federal and state mandates, hospitals and other healthcare providers would rather run a dose than give it to someone who does not have a chance.
At the same time, states like Massachusetts now have rules that require hospitals to report the number of vaccine doses thrown away, Jha said.
“The problem is that hospitals that report it are affected in the press because they are wasting vaccines,” Jha said. “So many hospitals do not report, and it is happening all over the country.”
Although there is still no solid number of how many Covid-19 vaccines have been discarded in the United States since its launch last month, the World Health Organization warned in 2005 that up to 50 percent of the vaccines released annually worldwide, ends up in the landfill due to supply chain problems, such as insufficient freezing space or transportation problems.
Some of the same problem has thwarted the Trump administration’s efforts to export the Covid-19 vaccines.
“I hope (and pray) that it is not as high as 50 percent, given the thousands of people who die every day,” said Dr. Sadiya Khan, an epidemiologist at Feinberg University of Northwestern University, said. “While it is an inevitable reality that some of the doses may be wasted, it will require careful planning and supervision to minimize waste.”
The expert infectious diseases, dr. John Swartzberg, agrees.
“I have not seen any data on how much vaccine was wasted (other than what I read in the newspapers),” said Swartzberg, an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health. “Given how necessary it is, I hope the WTO data is incorrect.”
For Sue Joss, CEO of Brockton Neighborhood Health Center in Brockton, Massachusetts, one dose of wasted Covid-19 vaccine is one too many.
It was Christmas Eve, she said, and a staff member who would receive the last remaining uptake of the 60 Modern vaccines removed from the cold room that day did not show up.
“We can not let this happen again,” Joss recalled, saying before the unclaimed dose was discarded.
So Joss has put in place a system to ensure that if someone does not show up for an appointment, there is still someone who is ready and waiting to take his or her place. “We now have a waiting list of people who can come in at short notice to get a chance,” she said.
But it’s not stupid either, Joss added.
“We went through the wards once last week to find a patient who was willing to take a chance so that a dose would not go to waste,” she said.
Similar stories of unused doses ending up in the garbage have been reported elsewhere in the country.
Dozens of doses destined for two hospitals in Portland, Oregon, were discarded when officials could not gather enough health workers to get the shots before the vaccines expired.
In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo has weakened rules to ensure that the first shots were fired at health workers on the front lines and residents of the nursing home – and that less threatened people did not stay in line – following reports that unused vaccines were discarded . .
And in Ohio, three dozen doses ended up in the trash after a nursing home in Lawrence County overestimated the number of vaccinations it needed, forcing the pharmacists who administered the shots to search.
“They did everything they could,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said. “They got everyone who wanted to shoot, but they still had a little left over and a lot left over.”
President Donald Trump, whose erratic leadership during the pandemic helped undermine his re-election offer, promised that 20 million people in the US would be vaccinated by the end of 2020.
But as of Thursday, 30.6 million doses of coronavirus vaccine had been distributed, with just 11.1 million people receiving their first shots, according to the federal vaccination tracker Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The massive deployment of coronavirus vaccines in the US has been hampered by poor planning, a distribution system that relies heavily on state and local governments to make the calls, and by well-meaning efforts to distribute the first doses to the most vulnerable population. restrict. which fell back.
Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to lead the world with more than 23 million confirmed Covid-19 cases and nearly 387,000 deaths, according to data compiled by NBC News and Johns Hopkins University.