State officials are resisting a TV report that said thousands of people vaccinated at the Oakland Coliseum this week received lower doses than they should have.
Citing two unidentified medical emergency technicians, KTVU reported on Wednesday that about 4,300 people who were vaccinated at the Oakland Coliseum before 2pm on Monday “received the wrong doses” of the Pfizer vaccine because the syringes left part of the vaccine at the bottom of the container. to inject everything.
State officials who run the clinic told The Chronicle that they recently started using a new type of syringe. But they vehemently denied that anyone at the Colosseum received very little vaccine.
“We are not aware of any cases of a single individual being under-vaccinated at the Oakland Coliseum site,” said Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the California Emergency Services Office, which operates the Coliseum site with the Federal Management Agency of Emergencies.
State officials have not alerted vaccine recipients to any problems, they said, because there is no problem.
KTVU reported that paramedics said the syringes were “designed so that the plunger does not reach the entire bottom”, leaving the syringes to deliver less than the full dose of the vaccine.
The Food and Drug Administration recommends that the Pfizer vaccine be administered in two doses of 0.3 milliliters each.
But a study in the New England Journal of Medicine says that people who receive 0.2mL of the vaccine will have almost as much immunity to the virus as those who receive 0.3mL, said Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at UCSF.
Other infectious disease experts contacted by The Chronicle declined to say whether they thought a lower dose would be as effective as the total amount. Everyone said that the vaccine manufacturer would have to answer that question.
Pfizer declined to comment.
The Coliseum opened on February 16 as one of the first mass vaccination sites in California. Federal and state officials said the goal is to administer up to 6,000 doses of the vaccine a day at the site, but supply problems have been a problem at the Colosseum and other vaccination sites.
The vaccine for Colosseum comes from the federal government and not from the state’s general allocation.
Michael Williams, Meghan Bobrowsky and Catherine Ho are writers for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]