Sometimes, when life casts a literal obstacle, you just need to improvise and hope for the best. It happened when a group of health professionals with doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were trapped in a snowstorm on an Oregon highway. Not wanting to let those doses expire, they administered them to drivers stuck in the snow.
On Tuesday, Josephine County’s public health team conducted a mass vaccination event at Illinois Valley High School in Cave Junction, Oregon. After a successful event, the team had six doses left to deliver to recipients on the Grants Pass. Unfortunately, the team was unable to reach Grants Pass because a snowstorm stranded them on Highway 199, near Hayes Hill.
To make matters worse, the vaccines were scheduled to expire before they reached their destination.
But workers were not willing to let good vaccines expire and with an ambulance in hand, they set up an improvised clinic on the road. The JCPH team walked from car to car offering jailed drivers a chance to get the COVID-19 vaccine. In the end, the six doses were successfully administered, making the best of a bad situation. One of the recipients was even a person who was unable to get to school in time for the original event.
I love this story. Getting stuck in a snowstorm is a terrible situation. You cannot move anywhere and have no idea when you will finally be moving again. It is even worse if you are a healthcare professional trying to administer a vaccine before it expires. But these people took action immediately to ensure that no doses were missed.
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To add the cherry on top of this wellness story, health department director Mike Weber said the situation was one of the coolest operations in which he had participated.