Four German health professionals were hospitalized on Sunday after receiving five times the recommended dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine.
Officials in the Vorpommern-Ruegen district said the doses were administered to eight employees, aged between 66 and 82, in a nursing home in the Hanseatic city of Stralsund on December 27.
When the error was discovered, employees sent half the employees home. However, the other half was sent to the hospital for observation after developing flu-like symptoms.
“I deeply regret the incident. This individual case is due to individual errors,” said Stefan Kerth, district administrator for Vorpommern-Ruegen, in a statement published on December 28. “I wish all those affected to experience no serious side effects.”
District officials cited an earlier statement from BioNTech that pointed out that large doses were used in the first phase of clinical trials of the vaccine without any serious consequences.
Photo by Omer Messinger / Getty Images
The incident occurred just one day after the vaccine was implemented in Germany and the European Union (EU).
Germany, Hungary and Slovakia began administering vaccines on Saturday after the EU approved Pfizer-BioNTech’s coronavirus injections on December 21.
Some German districts, however, refused to use the doses of the vaccine they received over the weekend because of concerns that the cold conditions needed to send the vaccine would be interrupted during delivery.
“When reading the temperature recorders placed in the thermal boxes, doubts arose about the fulfillment of the cold chain requirements,” the district of Lichtenfels, in the north of Germany’s largest state, Bavaria, said in a statement to the Reuters.
The medical team reportedly found that the temperature in one of the vaccine’s shipping boxes rose to 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit), far exceeding the ideal temperature for the vaccine.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the coronavirus vaccine Pfizer-BioNTech needs to be transported at a temperature between -112 degrees and -76 degrees Fahrenheit in a thermal transport container with dry ice.
Together with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the EU has contracts with the Swedish-British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca and the American company Moderna. The EU plans to vaccinate 6.25 million of the 447.7 million inhabitants before the end of the year.
Throughout the pandemic, Germany reported more than 1.6 million cases of COVID-19 and 30,500 deaths as of December 28, according to data from John Hopkins University.
Newsweek contacted the district office of Vorpommern-Ruegen, but received no response in time for publication.