Hundreds were lined up outside a UW Medical Center clinic on Thursday night. (Feliks Banel, Radio KIRO)
A peculiar scene took place in Seattle late on Thursday evening and on Friday morning, after hundreds of people got out of bed hoping to receive doses of the COVID-19 vaccine that were about to expire.
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This happened after the clinics were installed by Kaiser Permanente, which had 1,600 doses of vaccine scheduled to expire at 5:30 am on Friday, thanks to an unexpected freezer failure.
Feliks Banel of KIRO Radio discovered it around 11 pm on Thursday after receiving a text message from a friend. Thirty minutes later, he and his wife were waiting outside one of those clinics on the Northwest campus of UW Medical Center in Seattle.
At 11:30 pm, the parking lot was packed, with hundreds of people already in line. Forty-five minutes after they arrived, the line still hadn’t moved.
“The atmosphere was calm and peaceful, like people waiting at night to buy tickets to a show that would happen many months into the future (as I did at least once in the 1980s for REM at Boston Garden),” he described. “I never felt panicked or scared, but it seemed a little surreal to be so late for something so serious.”
After a few searches ahead of the line, they found that, in addition to the hundreds of people waiting outside, another 200 were also lined up inside. The facility reportedly had only 500 total doses available to the assembled crowd.
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At around 12:15 pm, a UW official began to inform people after a certain point in the queue that “they were not likely to receive an injection based on the number of people ahead and the number of doses remaining”.
Feliks and his wife decided to pack up and go home after that announcement, closing a surreal night for everyone involved.
“It was a bizarre experience, completely consistent with all the other weird new experiences from last year or something – social detachment, lack of toilet paper, masking, drive-through COVID testing – and it gave me even more appreciation for my parents’ much more traumatic individual experiences in Europe during the war, 80 years ago ”, he detailed.
The UW Medical Center told The Seattle Times that it managed to distribute all doses of the expired vaccine. It is not clear whether the Swedish and Kaiser clinics have achieved similar success for their hospital clinics.