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People who do not have priority are vaccinated ahead of schedule when pharmacies thaw extra doses.
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In some cases, vaccine providers are faced with the decision to discard extra doses when they expire or are given to random people.
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Other times, confusion about the amount of doses per vial and rumors about excessive supply have led to accidents in the allocation of vaccines.
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Across the country, some non-health workers are getting their COVID-19 vaccinations earlier than expected because pharmacies have extra doses left over.
This is not to say that there are generally an excessive amount of vaccines. However, both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines must be stored at cold temperatures and used within hours of thawing, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In some cases, pharmacies and hospitals find remaining doses at the end of the day, and they are faced with the choice of disposing of the vials or offering them to recipients with a lower priority.
Although the Food and Drug Administration has given green vaccine providers to use extra doses in the Pfizer and Moderna vials, the federal government has not specified what to do if there are more thawed doses than the recipients.
Some providers have taken matters into their own hands to ensure that no vaccine doses are misused. They offered the leftovers to local first responders, pharmacy staff and occasionally an average person who was in the right place at the right time.
A Kentucky couple heard of extra doses from a friend and ‘ran upright’
The news of extra vaccine doses at Walgreens in Louisville, Kentucky reached the Mastersons verbally on Christmas Eve.
“[A friend] called us, and we ran upright. “It was pure luck,” Andrew Masterson, co-owner of local Captain’s Quarters restaurant, told the Louisville Courier-Journal, adding that he and his wife, who are undergoing chemotherapy for stage 4 cancer, each receive a dose. Got Pfizer vaccine on Walgreens that day.
The pharmacy chain was contracted to supply vaccines to long-term care facilities in Kentucky, and on Dec. 24, “the amount of vaccine doses requested by facilities exceeded actual need,” Walgreens spokesman Phil Caruso told the Courier Journal.
Caruso told the premise that this situation was an isolated event, but Governor Andy Beshear confirmed that a similar incident took place last week at a Walgreens in Lexington, Kentucky.
“The reaction was not what it should have been,” Beshear told the Courier-Journal, referring to both incidents. “Now, I believe it came from a good place – yes, because they did not want any of it to go to waste, but had to be done differently – yes.”
In DC, a law student got lucky in the supermarket
Law school student David MacMillan obtained groceries at a Giant Food in Washington, DC, when a pharmacist asked him and his friend if they wanted the Moderna vaccine.
Not all of the health care that had to receive the dose on that day, a Giant representative wrote in a statement saying he supported the pharmacist’s actions.
The pair quickly accepted the offer. MacMillan posted a video on TikTok outlining his experience Friday.
“She turned to us and was like, ‘Hey, I have two doses of the vaccine and I’ll have to throw it away if I do not give it to anyone. We’ll close within ten minutes. Do you want the Modern vaccine? ? ‘he said in the video.
MacMillan told NBC Washington that he posted the video to address incorrect information regarding the COVID-19 vaccine.
“It’s important that when there is so much misinformation going around that people can see that it’s a good thing, it’s a positive thing. We need to be excited to deal with the pandemic,” MacMillan said.
In other cases, confusion over dosages led to misuse of vaccines
Not all cases of people receiving extra doses were happy accidents.
Hundreds of seniors in Tennessee were turned down on New Year’s Eve to get a COVID-19 vaccine, just for health officials to call their family and friends to shoot later that day.
The Hamilton County Department of Health tweeted that people ‘please leave the queue now and return at another time’, just over an hour after vaccinations began, because the queue was so long that it was the highway, the NBC subsidiary WRCB-TV reported.
Later that day, officials said they realized there were more thawed vials to be used, which prompted them to give shots to non-priority recipients.
At Stanford Hospital last week, a number of non-clinical affiliates were vaccinated because they were under the impression that there were extra doses. Stanford issued a statement saying there was not actually an excess of vaccines.
Finally, a woman who said she works for Disney wrote in a Facebook entry (which has since been removed) that she received a vaccine from Redlands Community Hospital in Southern California using family connections. There were doses left over after the vaccinations of health workers at the front in that case, but the extra shots were supposed to go to health workers with a lower priority.
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