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NASHVILLE, Tennessee – As millions of people continue to wait their turn for the COVID-19 vaccine, small but steady amounts of the precious doses have been wasted across the country.
It’s a heartbreaking reality that experts said was always likely to happen. Thousands of shots were wasted in Tennessee, Florida, Ohio, and many other states. The reasons vary from poor record keeping to the accidental destruction of hundreds of blueprints. However, determining how many vital vials were thrown away remains largely unknown despite assurances from many local officials that the number remains low.
Admittedly, waste is common in global immunization campaigns, with millions of doses of influenza vaccines destroyed each year. According to an estimate by the World Health Organization, up to half of vaccines from previous campaigns around the world were thrown away because they were mismanaged, unclaimed or expired.
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By comparison, the COVID-19 vaccine wastage appears to be quite low, although the U.S. government has yet to release figures to better understand its extent. Officials have promised that may change soon as more data is collected from states.
In the meantime, state health agencies are much more inclined to tout the speed at which they have administered the injections while being silent about how many doses end up in the trash.
The Ohio Department of Health has resisted the use of the term “wasted” at the Associated Press’s request for a total number of doses thrown away. Instead, a spokesperson for the agency said the state is tracking “unusable” vaccines reported by state suppliers.
“With 3.2 million doses administered as of March 9, 2021, the 3,396 unusable doses reported by state providers represent about 0.1% of doses administered – less than the CDC’s expectation of 5% of unusable doses. Alicia Shoults, an Ohio department of health spokesperson, said in an email.
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According to a roadmap provided by the department, providers in Ohio reported nearly 60 incidents where doses were not being used. The biggest incident happened earlier this year, when a pharmacy responsible for distributing the vaccine to nursing homes failed to document the storage temperatures of the remaining injections, resulting in wasted 890 doses.
In Tennessee, wasted, spoiled, or unused doses are not publicly disclosed on the state’s online COVID-19 vaccine dashboard. However, after nearly 4,500 Tennessee doses were ruined in February, the state Department of Health rushed to find answers.
It started with nearly 1,000 doses reported missing in Knox County, eastern Tennessee, where emotional local leaders told reporters a shipment was accidentally thrown by an employee who believed the box contained dry ice.
Soon after, nearly 2,500 doses were reported wasted in Shelby County – which includes Memphis – due to poor communication and insufficient record keeping within the local health department. 1,000 separate doses were then reported spoiled in central Tennessee after a school district reported a storage error.
Despite the recent spate of wasted vaccine incidents, the health agency said that number was only part of the nearly 1.9 million doses the state has received since December.
“We don’t think there is a systemic statewide problem, but we are ramping up our compliance efforts just to be sure,” State Health Commissioner Lisa Piercey told reporters. early this month.
Piercey said Tennessee would soon conduct a review of the state’s vaccine distribution efforts to avoid future waste, and ultimately hire a separate company to do the quality checks.
Meanwhile, in Florida, surgeon general Dr Scott Rivkees recently called for an audit after more than 1,000 doses of the vaccine were reported damaged last month in Palm Beach County. When asked to review that audit, the state said this week it would provide those documents through a public records request – which it was still compiling.
Like other states, Florida does not regularly publish the number of doses that don’t end up in guns, but a spokesperson for the state’s health department said 4,435 doses were wasted on Monday.
In Louisiana, health officials are giving reporters updated totals of wasted doses during the governor’s weekly briefing on COVID-19. Of the 1.2 million doses of vaccine administered so far, less than 1,500 had been wasted on Tuesday, said Dr Joe Kanter, the governor’s chief public health adviser.
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The federal government has also delayed the release of a spoiled or unusable dose count, though it says states should report this waste in its vaccine tracking system.
“We are working to find out how to provide this data online in the future when the data is more complete,” said Kristen Nordlund, spokesperson for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, in an email.
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