Four German health workers were admitted to hospital on Sunday after receiving the recommended dose of the Pfizer BioNTech coronavirus vaccine five times.
Officials from the district of Vorpommern-Ruegen said the doses were administered on December 27 to eight employees, ranging from 66 to 82 years, in a nursing home in the Hanseatic city of Stralsund.
When the error was discovered, officials sent half of the employees home. However, the other half were sent to the hospital for observation after developing flu-like symptoms.
“I regret the incident. This individual case is due to individual errors,” Stefan Kerth, a district administrator in Vorpommern-Ruegen, said in a statement published on December 28. “I wish all involved that they do not experience any serious side effects.”
District officials quoted an earlier statement from BioNTech as pointing out that large doses were used in the first phase of clinical trials without any serious consequences.
Photo by Omer Messinger / Getty Images
The incident took place only one day in Germany and the vaccination of the European Union (EU).
Germany, Hungary and Slovakia began administering vaccines on Saturday after the EU approved the December 21 Pfizer BioNTech coronavirus shots.
However, some German districts refused to use the vaccine doses they received over the weekend due to concerns that the cold conditions for sending the vaccine were interrupted during childbirth.
“When reading the temperature registers contained in the refrigerators, doubts arose about compliance with the cold chain requirements,” the district of Lichtenfels, north of Germany’s largest state, Bavaria, said in a statement to Reuters.
Medical staff reportedly found that the temperature in one of the vaccine’s transport boxes had risen to 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit), far exceeding the ideal temperature for the vaccine.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine must be transported at a temperature between -112 degrees and -76 degrees Fahrenheit in a thermal container with dry ice.
Together with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the EU has contracts with the British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca and the American company Moderna. The EU expects to vaccinate 6.25 million of its 447.7 million population before the end of the year.
During the pandemic, Germany reported more than 1.6 million cases of COVID-19 and 30,500 deaths on December 28, according to data from John Hopkins University.
Newsweek reached the Vorpommern-Ruegen district office, but did not hear in time for publication.