Key UK workers receive covid Covid injections to avoid wasting vaccine | Coronavirus

It is a daily conundrum that has preoccupied medical personnel since the start of the vaccine deployment. How do you avoid wasting the remaining doses while ensuring that those most in need have priority?

At the start of the vaccination program, the answers came easily. The younger medical staff who were on the government priority list were entered into hospital wards or general practitioner offices to receive vaccinations from the few remaining doses at the end of the clinic. As the number of people receiving their first dose reached millions, the volunteers for the vaccination clinics were as follows.

But now they’ve all been trapped, vaccinators are turning to police, firefighters, taxi drivers, teachers, supermarket staff, family and friends – anyone who can be reached easily and who is free. to get to the clinic with a few minutes notice. .

The alternative would be unthinkable – throwing away perfectly usable doses of the vaccine while millions of people are still at risk of catching and transmitting Covid.

Yet this practice has been both hailed and criticized by political leaders and senior NHS officials, and now a bizarre code of silence weighs on the immunization program.

“You can’t use my name,” a general practitioner told the Observer“Or what city I am in. If you do, we’ll all get an email letting us know we shouldn’t. But neither are we allowed to waste vaccines. “

“There are no official guidelines,” said another. “Don’t waste your vaccine. We just have to do what makes sense. It was pretty easy at first when we focused on the over 70s, and you are some 55. You think “well, they’re gonna be done in two weeks anyway.”

“But as you start to go through the list, it becomes controversial. And now that we’re doing the first nine categories, the next people are under 50. “

The cohorts were established by the Joint Committee on Immunization and Immunization which set priorities based on age and vulnerability. Everyone in the first nine cohorts – and anyone 50 or older – should have been offered a shot by the end of March.

Leftovers are an inevitable consequence of a high-speed mass vaccination campaign. When 350 people are registered in a clinic with a few days’ notice, some do not show up.

But the Pfizer vaccine lasts for three days once thawed, and both it and the AstraZeneca vaccine have expiration dates. And vaccine vials usually contain additional doses. “Pfizer is supposed to have five, but we get six,” said one of the GPs. “AstraZeneca 10 dose vials can give you 13.”

She described the clinic as an act of juggling: “In the end, you figure out how many doses you have left – hopefully no more than one or two. All the people you booked must be from cohorts one through nine. So you start looking for someone else.

“There were calls to the fire stations for anyone who was not on duty,” an NHS source said. “The caregivers bring their 80-year-old mother to be vaccinated. Taxi drivers.

“On the days when it was a little quiet, they unofficially contacted the heads of local schools,” said a volunteer at a vaccination clinic in London. “Coming teachers, police officers and women – people on the front line, people who, for most of us, should benefit anyway.

“We try not to take people off the streets,” said a general practitioner who runs a vaccination center. “This is no way to run a clinic. But our marshal has the number of a local police station, and we also had contact from a local high school saying that “our staff would be very keen to get vaccinated.” “

Both Labor and Vaccine Minister Nadim Zahawi had said in February that they believed key workers should be given priority for vaccinations, but JCVI guidelines released later in the month did not grant them any special status on the grounds that most of the key workers did not have any special status. higher risk of contracting Covid due to their occupation.

Some clinics ended up throwing away supplies. A woman in her thirties told the Observer how it was turned down after a friend working at a clinic in East Anglia said they needed to find people for five remaining doses of Pfizer. “When I got there, I said, very simply, that I had been told that there were a few doses left. The woman looked at me and said, “How is this going to be on social media? It felt like it wasn’t even ethical for me to be there.

“But later my friend told me that those five doses had been wasted. I fully understand that I am not part of a high priority group. I wouldn’t want to push my way in front of anyone. But I think I’m worth more than a garbage can. “

In January, NHS England asked GPs to draw up reserve lists of patients who could get to clinics on short notice, and there was remarkably little waste. An access to information request revealed that of 156,262 doses of Pfizer used before January 8, only 1,055 injections were wasted.