- A woman who said she was a Disney employee in her 30s said in a Facebook post that she received a vaccine from a California hospital with the help of family connections, the Orange County Register reported over the weekend.
- The hospital said in a statement to Insider that “several doses were administered to health professionals outside the front line so that the valuable vaccine was not thrown away.”
- Health care professionals and residents of long-term care facilities were the first to receive coronavirus vaccines, as recommended by the advisory committee of the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
- Visit the Insider home page for more stories.
A woman in her 30s who said she worked for Disney said she received a coronavirus vaccine from a hospital in California, according to a local report, as the state struggles with an overwhelming increase in cases.
The woman said in a Facebook post that she received a vaccine from Redlands Community Hospital in Southern California, with the help of family connections, the Orange County Register reported over the weekend. The Register did not reveal the woman’s name and said she had removed the post from Facebook.
The hospital said in a statement to Insider that “there were several doses left” after frontline officials received the vaccines. He added that “since the reconstituted Pfizer vaccine must be used within a few hours or discarded, multiple doses have been administered to health professionals outside the front line so that the valuable vaccine is not thrown away.”
Read More: 5 public health experts told us what the U.S. needs to do now to get COVID-19 under control
An advisory committee at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that health professionals and residents of long-term care facilities be the first to receive coronavirus vaccines, while people over 75 and essential frontline workers should be the next group.
But these are only recommendations; states decide who is next in line for vaccines. Florida and Texas are vaccinating people over the age of 65 from younger essential frontline workers, breaking with the CDC’s recommendation, Aylin Woodward of Business Insider said on Monday. A report by the Kaiser Family Foundation published earlier this month said that seven states have departed from the CDC’s recommendations for the first phase of vaccination.
Meanwhile, at least 30,000 new cases have been reported daily in California since mid-December, according to the COVID Tracking Project. Hospitals running out of space have set up tents to receive more patients.
The state recorded more than 2 million cases of coronavirus and more than 24,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.