- A woman who said she was a Disney employee in her early 30s said in a Facebook post that she received a vaccine from a California hospital using family ties, The Orange County Register reported the weekend.
- The hospital said in a statement to Insider that a number of doses had been administered to frontline health workers so that valuable vaccine could not be discarded. ‘
- Healthcare workers and residents of long-term care facilities are the first to receive coronavirus vaccines, as recommended by a U.S. Advisory Committee on Disease Control and Prevention Centers.
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According to a woman in her early thirties who works for Disney, she received a coronavirus vaccine from a hospital in California, according to a local report, while the state is struggling with an overwhelming increase in cases.
The woman said in a Facebook post that she received a vaccine from Redlands Community Hospital in Southern California using family ties, The Orange County Register reported over the weekend. The Register did not name the woman and said she had deleted the Facebook post.
The hospital said in a statement to Insider that a number of doses remained after people on the front line received the vaccines. It added that “because the reconstituted Pfizer vaccine must be used or discarded within hours, multiple doses are not given to health care workers who are not at the forefront so that valuable vaccine is not discarded.”
Read more: 5 public health experts tell us what the US should do now to get COVID-19 under control
An advisory committee for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities be given first coronavirus vaccines, while people over 75 and essential workers should be the next group in the first place.
But these are merely recommendations; states decide who is next in line for the vaccines. In Florida and Texas, people over the age of 65 are being vaccinated because of younger essential workers on the front lines, who do not agree with the CDC’s recommendation, Business Insider Aylin Woodward reported Monday. A report by the Kaiser Family Foundation published earlier this month said seven states deviated from the CDC’s recommendations for the first vaccination phase.
Meanwhile, at least 30,000 new cases have been reported daily in California since mid-December, according to The COVID Tracking Project. Hospitals that no longer have space have pitched tents to accommodate more patients.
According to Johns Hopkins University data, the state has recorded more than 2 million cases of coronavirus and more than 24,000 deaths.