Almost as soon as the COVID-19 vaccine was made available in California, reports of people jumping the priority line ahead of frontline workers and long-term residents began to emerge.
More recently, a 33-year-old Disney employee revealed on Facebook that she received the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine through a relative with connections to Redlands Community Hospital.
Although state officials have warned that moving forward could lead to sanctions, state guidance allows exceptions and it appears that some people are taking advantage of it aggressively.
Redlands Hospital officials confirmed that they administered the vaccine to several outside the frontline staff, but only because extra doses were left over after the frontline staff received the vaccine, they said.
According to the California Department of Public Health, such a scenario could be allowed.
According to state guidelines released this month, health departments and units can offer doses of vaccines to people in lower priority groups when demand is reduced and doses are about to expire.
“Health departments can temporarily adjust prioritization based on other resource constraints, while efforts continue to immunize higher-priority groups as soon as possible,” the guidelines say.
Flexible guidance illustrates the rapid evolution of the factors that influence how the vaccine is delivered. State rules have been ambiguous about what happens when a hospital ends up with additional doses of vaccine if all frontline employees who want and can receive the vaccine do so.
State officials have warned that people are not allowed to cut in front of priority level recipients.
“I just want to make that very clear: if you skip the queue or intend to skip the queue, you will be sanctioned, you will lose your license,” Governor Gavin Newsom said on Monday, placing the burden on medical professionals. “We will be very aggressive here.”
The guideline was changed after it appeared that some hospitals would receive extra doses in the bottles.
Each vial contains five to six doses of vaccine. After a bottle is opened, its shelf life is about six hours.
“It’s really a use-or-lose situation. You can’t leave it for tomorrow morning’s shift, ”said Andrew Noymer, associate professor of public health at UC Irvine.
Still, Noymer said that for multiple doses not to be used, several vials would have to be opened prematurely.
“If you don’t have the doses, don’t reconstitute the bottle,” he said, noting that if five bottles offer about 25 doses, it may be normal to have about four left, but that every effort should be made to vaccinate people in the environment hospital.
“It really raises the question of whether everyone on duty at the time has already received theirs,” including the pharmacist, the person who greets people when they enter the building or the custody team, he said.
The Disney employee shared her story on Facebook last week, but has since removed it, the Orange County Register reported over the weekend. The newspaper did not identify the woman, but the hospital confirmed that it had provided doses of vaccine to several officials outside the front line.
“Redlands Community Hospital has administered its quota of Pfizer vaccines to its frontline doctors, healthcare professionals and support staff in accordance with the CDPH Guidelines. After doctors and staff who expressed an interest in the vaccine were administered, there were several doses left. Since the reconstituted vaccine from Pfizer should be used within a few hours or discarded, multiple doses were administered to health professionals outside the front line so that the valuable vaccine was not thrown away, ”said marketing manager Nikyah Thomas-Pfeiffer on Monday -market.
Thomas-Pfeiffer said that all employees, including caretakers and technicians, had access to the vaccine. It was not clear how many doses the hospital received and how many people are on the team.
Vaccination guidelines will be updated again this week. Newsom and Dr. Mark Ghaly, California’s secretary of health and human services, indicated on Monday that they would focus on how prioritization will be applied. The prioritization list should be updated as early as Wednesday.