A hospital Covid-19 vaccination team appears in the emergency room to inoculate employees who have not received the vaccines.
Finding only a few, the team is about to leave when an emergency room doctor suggests that they give the remaining doses to vulnerable patients or non-hospital workers. The team refuses, saying it would violate hospital policy and state guidelines.
Furious, the doctor climbs up the hospital chain of command until he finds an administrator who gives the team the OK to use the rest of the doses.
But by the time the doctor tracks down the medical team, his shift is over and, following the protocol, the remaining doses are now in the trash.
Isolated incident? No way, Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University School of Public Health, told NBC News.
“That kind of thing is pretty rampant,” said Jha. “I personally heard stories like that from dozens of medical friends in several different states. Hundreds, if not thousands, of doses are being thrown across the country every day. It’s unbelievable.”
Jha said the emergency room doctor whose story he told in a Twitter topic this week he asked not to be named, but his story, seen by thousands of people, resonated with other medical professionals frustrated by rules and regulations that they say are making it more difficult for more Americans to vaccinate.
Why is this happening? Covid-19 vaccines have a short shelf life as they are thawed for use, said Jha. And because of federal and state mandates, hospitals and other health care providers would rather run the risk of a spoiled dose than give it to someone who is not scheduled to have an injection.
At the same time, states like Massachusetts now have rules requiring hospitals to report the number of doses of vaccines that have been discarded, said Jha.
“The problem is that hospitals that report this are criticized in the press for wasting vaccines,” said Jha. “So many hospitals are not reporting and this is happening across the country.”
Although there does not appear to be any solid number of how many Covid-19 vaccines have been discarded in the United States since launching last month, the World Health Organization warned in 2005 that up to 50 percent of vaccines launched globally each year end up in the trash. because of supply chain problems, like not having enough freezer space or transportation problems.
Some of these same problems have hampered the Trump administration’s efforts to launch Covid-19 vaccines.
“I hope (and pray) that it is not as high as 50 percent, given the thousands of people who die every day,” said Dr. Sadiya Khan, an epidemiologist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “While it is an unavoidable reality that a proportion of doses can be missed, careful planning and supervision will be necessary to minimize waste.”
Infectious disease specialist Dr. John Swartzberg agrees.
“I didn’t see any data on how much vaccine was lost (other than what I read in the papers),” said Swartzberg, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health. “Given how necessary it is, I hope that the WHO data is incorrect.”
For Sue Joss, CEO of the Brockton Neighborhood Health Center in Brockton, Massachusetts, a missed dose of the Covid-19 vaccine is too much.
It was Christmas Eve, she said, and an official scheduled to receive the last remaining injection of the 60 Modern vaccines that had been removed from cold storage that day did not show up.
“We can’t let that happen again,” Joss recalls saying before the unclaimed dose was dropped.
So, Joss implemented a system to ensure that if someone doesn’t show up for an appointment, someone else is ready and waiting to take their place. “We now have a waiting list of people who can come in at short notice to take a picture,” she said.
But that is also not foolproof, added Joss.
“Once, last week, we marched down the halls to find a patient willing to have an injection, so that a dose would not be missed,” she said.
Similar stories of unused doses falling into the trash have been reported in other parts of the country.
Dozens of doses destined for two hospitals in Portland, Oregon, were thrown out when authorities failed to gather enough health workers to get the vaccines before the vaccines expired.
In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo loosened rules designed to ensure that the first shots were for health professionals and nursing home residents – and that less threatened people did not cut the queue – after reports that unused vaccines were being thrown out.
And in Ohio, three dozen doses fell into the trash after a health care facility in Lawrence County overestimated the number of vaccines needed, forcing the pharmacists who administered the injections to look for policyholders.
“They did everything they could,” said Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. “They caught everyone who would try, but they had leftovers, a lot of leftovers.”
President Donald Trump, whose erratic leadership during the pandemic helped condemn his candidacy for re-election, had promised that 20 million people in the United States would be immunized by the end of 2020.
But by Thursday, 30.6 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine had been distributed, with only 11.1 million people receiving their first injections, according to the vaccination tracker at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The massive launch of the coronavirus vaccine in the US has been hampered by inadequate planning, a distribution system that relies largely on state and local governments to make these connections, and by well-intentioned attempts to limit the distribution of first doses to most vulnerable populations that backfired.
Meanwhile, the United States continues to lead the world, with more than 23 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 and nearly 387,000 deaths, according to data compiled by NBC News and Johns Hopkins University.