A broken freezer with more than sixteen hundred doses of COVID-19 vaccine can be catastrophic. Instead, quick thinking and brave action made a disaster in Seattle a miracle. When it became clear that the doses of Moderna would expire rapidly, two clinics split the doses and sent the late-night call to arms.
Eventually every dose was used, and more than sixteen hundred privileged Seattle residents came before the vaccination curve:
Hundreds of people rushed to the clinics of the University of Seattle and the University of Washington late Thursday night to try to receive a COVID-19 vaccine before the doses expired.
Spokesmen for both Sweden and UW said that a freezer that stored the COVID-19 vaccine from Moderna broke at Kaiser Permanente, causing 1,650 doses of the vaccine to run.
Swedes and UW divided the doses and started administering.
“Teams worked vigilantly and early in the morning and early in the morning to ensure that all doses were used and that no vaccination was lost,” said a Kaiser Permanent Washington representative.
Given the highly regulated environment in which this effort has taken place, this quick thinking and quick action is all the more impressive. We have heard stories of doses that have spoiled, whether by accident or, among other things, suspicious circumstances, and we should expect at least the former type of hiccups to occur occasionally. Usually, the regulations and penalties for violating it would have put the doses in the trash, as this early stage of vaccinations does not exactly reward the thinking outside the box.
As, for example, more than one person noted on Twitter, Andrew Cuomo’s draconian fines for vaccination outside his rigid regime would never have yielded this kind of excessive intercourse. Hundreds of people would never have received these doses. Instead, given room for innovation and creative thinking, Seattle health providers have turned a failure into an exciting success, all between 11:00 and 2:30 p.m.
The men and women who have taken these steps to protect their community and get the most out of every dose of the endangered doses deserve praise. Let’s hope that we will soon see enough of these doses so that we do not have to stick to the rigid distribution models in the first place.
Addendum: Also note where it took place – in the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle. This is where anarchists seized several blocks of the city in June and created the CHAZ – Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Imagine that the city still tolerated it. Innovation and creativity require public order and stability, as well as space to make quick decisions without draconian fines.