NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE – As millions are still waiting their turn for the COVID-19 vaccine, small but steady amounts of precious doses have been destroyed across the country.
It is a heartbreaking reality that experts acknowledge would always happen. Thousands of shots were fired in Tennessee, Florida, Ohio and many other states. The reasons range from poor record keeping to accidentally hundreds of shots. However, determining how many of the life-saving vials were thrown is still unknown, despite assurances from many local officials that the number is still low.
To put it bluntly, waste is common in global inoculation campaigns, with millions of doses of flu injections every year. According to one estimate by the World Health Organization, as many as half of the vaccines in previous campaigns worldwide have been discarded because they have been mishandled, unclaimed or expired.
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By comparison, the wastage of the COVID-19 vaccine appears to be relatively small, although the U.S. government has yet to release figures that provide insight into its extent. Officials have promised that this may change soon as more data is collected from the states.
In the meantime, state health agencies are much more likely to indicate how quickly they administered the shots while maintaining the amount of doses that end up in the trash.
The Ohio Department of Health opposed the use of the term ‘wasted’ when the Associated Press asked for a total number of thrown doses. Instead, a spokesman for the agency said the state follows ‘unusable’ vaccines that are reported by state providers.
“With 3.2 million doses administered as of March 9, 2021, the 3,396 unusable doses reported by government providers account for approximately 0.1% of the doses administered – less than the CDC expectation of 5% unusable doses, said Alicia Shoults, an Ohio Department of Health spokeswoman, in an email.
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According to a log provided by the department, Ohio suppliers reported nearly 60 incidents where doses were not used. The biggest incident occurred earlier this year when a pharmacy responsible for distributing the vaccine among nursing homes was unable to document the storage temperature for remaining shots. As a result, 890 doses were wasted.
In Tennessee, wasted, spoiled or unused doses are not publicly announced on the state’s online COVID-19 vaccine board. However, after nearly 4,500 doses of Tennessee were destroyed in February, the Department of Health scrambled to find answers.
It began with nearly 1,000 doses missing in Knox County, eastern Tennessee, where emotional local leaders told reporters that a consignment was accidentally thrown by an employee who allegedly contained the ice cream in the box.
Shortly thereafter, nearly 2,500 doses were wasted in Shelby County – which includes Memphis – due to improper communication and inadequate record keeping in the local health department. A separate 1,000 doses were then spoiled in mid-Tennessee after a storage error was reported in a school district.
Despite the recent series of wasted vaccine incidents, the health agency stressed that the number is only a little of the nearly 1.9 million doses the state has received since December.
“We do not believe there is a systemic problem across the country, but we are putting more effort into ensuring it,” Lisa Piercey, the state’s health commissioner, told reporters earlier this month.
Piercey said Tennessee will soon review the state’s efforts to distribute vaccines to prevent future waste, and eventually hire a separate company to carry out the quality checks.
Meanwhile, the surgeon general dr. Scott Rivkees recently called for an audit in Florida after more than 1,000 doses of vaccine were damaged in Palm Beach County last month. When asked by the state to review the audit, the state said this week that it would provide the documents through a request for public records – which it is still drafting.
Like other states, Florida does not regularly publish how many doses end up in the gun, but according to a State Health Department spokesman, 4,435 doses were wasted on Monday.
In Louisiana, health officials are giving updated total wasted doses to reporters during the governor’s weekly COVID-19 briefing. Of the 1.2 million doses of vaccines administered so far, less than 1,500 have been wasted as of Tuesday, Dr. Joe Kanter, the governor’s chief, said.
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The federal government has also released the number of released or unusable doses, though it says states should report such waste in their vaccination detector.
“We are working to find out how you can provide this data online in the future when the data is more complete,” Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, said in an email.