Approximately 4,400 Modern coronavirus vaccines sent to Maine are being replaced after they were potentially spoiled after exceeding the maximum temperature, health officials said on Tuesday.
Thirty-five sites that have administered vaccines have received compromised doses that have not yet been used, said Nirav Shah, director of Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The doses are sent with an electronic device that indicates whether the vaccines exceed the maximum required temperature of 4 degrees below zero, which alerted the authorities to the problem.
Shah said the state and federal governments are working with Moderna to find out if vaccines can be used, but he has withheld doses for now as a precaution. These sites will receive replacement doses already today, he said. He said other states, including Connecticut, had a similar problem with some doses.
Health officials are investigating where in the process the vaccines have been potentially compromised, Shah said. He believed that this happened during the shipping or processing phase, not with suppliers or when vaccines passed through Maine’s CDC.
Moderna vaccines are generally shipped to small healthcare providers who may not have the capacity to store the Pfizer vaccine, which requires an deep-frozen freezer to remain viable. They can also be supported with the help of dry ice. Moderna vaccines are also shipped in packs of 100 – Pfizer comes in packs of 975 – which allow easier storage for smaller clinics.
The number of potentially compromised vaccines is about a quarter of the vaccines Maine ordered last week and half of Moderna’s order, according to a press release. The state has received tens of thousands of vaccines a week, often less than expected.
Maine recently expanded its vaccine program to include older Mainers and those with health problems that make them more vulnerable to the virus, but this process is expected to be relatively slow if the distribution of the vaccine does not increase. Last week, it was revealed that there was no reserve of vaccines that the federal government planned to release.