Forty-two people in Boone County, southwestern West Virginia, who were scheduled to receive the coronavirus vaccine on Wednesday, were mistakenly injected with an experimental treatment with monoclonal antibody, said the West Virginia National Guard on Thursday. -market.
None of the 42 recipients have developed any adverse effects so far, the Guard said in a statement. Guarda, which is leading the state’s vaccine distribution effort, called the error “a failure in the process”.
The experimental treatment, a cocktail of antibodies made by Regeneron, is the same that President Trump received when he was hospitalized with Covid-19 in November. It should be administered as an intravenous infusion, not as a direct injection like the vaccine.
General James Hoyer, the assistant general of the West Virginia National Guard, said the confusion apparently occurred during the delivery of a shipment of the Regeneron cocktail to a distribution center, where the vials were placed between the supplies of the Modern vaccine. The center’s workers apparently included the treatment vials in a vaccine shipment to Boone County.
General Hoyer attributed the situation to “some human errors” and said that the Guard acted quickly as soon as it realized what had happened. “We found a problem, we are fixing it and moving on,” he said in a radio interview On thursday.
No other vaccine shipments were affected, the Guard said in a statement.
The vials for the treatment and the vaccine look somewhat similar, but are clearly labeled, as are the boxes that contain them. Both are kept refrigerated before use.
The error occurred at a time when the record number of hospitalizations across the country signaled a greater need than ever for antibody treatments, which are scarce and expensive, although some supplies are not used in refrigerators across the country. .
West Virginia officials reported 1,109 new cases of coronavirus and 20 new deaths on Thursday. There have been at least 85,334 cases and 1,338 deaths in the state since the pandemic began, according to a New York Times database.