More than 4,000 people who received vaccines at the Oakland Coliseum mass vaccination site on Monday may have received the wrong dose, according to a new report. Underdosing may not cause problems with COVID immunity, officials say, however, this means that used syringes are causing at least 1,000 missed doses of vaccine per day.
KTVU broke the news on Wednesday after medical personnel working at the Colosseum contacted the station with concerns that the story was being swept under the rug. At issue are some cheap syringes that are supposed to leave behind 0.05 mL to 0.1 mL of vaccine fluid when their plungers are fully depressed. Before local staff realized the problem on Monday afternoon, about 4,200 people passed through and probably received less than the ideal 0.3 mL dose of the vaccine – somewhere between 0.2 mL to 0.25 mL, depending on how hard the person who administered it pressed the plunger.
The problem was supposedly fixed with the syringes being filled a little more, but that means the vaccine continues to be wasted – and there are slightly more expensive spring syringes that could be used instead, doctors say.
KTVU said officials at the California Emergency Services Office and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the agencies that administer the Colosseum site, were unaware of the problem until KTVU informed them on Tuesday. As KTVU reports, “Cal OES spokesman Brian Ferguson said that as whistleblowers brought the problem to light, high-level meetings were held Tuesday afternoon between their agencies, as well as the Department of Public Health. of the state, US Health and Human Services and Pfizer, to determine what to do. “
Ferguson said that all parties involved concluded that the leftover vaccines in the syringes were “insignificant” and vaccinated individuals did not need to be informed about the problem. Pfizer says that unless individuals receive less than half the ideal amount, their immunity levels should not be affected.
Dr. John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at UC Berkeley Public Health, told KTVU that the jury is still out, scientifically, on what the impact of a lower first dose might be. And he suggests that individuals who may have received the least amount may consider receiving a booster injection in a few months.
Even so, the question of vaccine waste, when we talk about this scale of waste, is of great concern at a time when the supply of vaccine is still slow. Just this week, we learned that Sutter Health had to postpone more than 40,000 consultations for the second dose due to the delay in delivery. And restaurant workers in San Francisco and Alameda counties are struggling to try to get vaccines as restaurants reopen for indoor meals, but due to the low supply, most of them failed to make an appointment while teachers also competed and obtained priority access codes.
If each of these syringes is leaving behind 0.05 mL to 0.1 mL of vaccine each time an injection is given, and assuming that more than 7,000 injections are being given there each day, that would mean that more than 1,750 injections extras will be wasted daily as long as the site continues to use these cheap syringes.
One of KTVU’s sources, which is administering injections on the spot, says they are now using a mixture of cheap syringes and spring syringes that cause less waste.
Related: SF teachers and restaurant staff now compete for vaccine appointments, with teachers getting paid off their first debts
Photo: Dennis Klicker