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MIDLOTHIAN, Va .– Kroger, Thursday night, still did not explain why several people were mistakenly injected with an empty syringe instead of a COVID-19 vaccine at a clinic in central Virginia.
Several people entered the Midlothian Kroger on Monday and Tuesday hoping to get vaccinated with the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine.
Instead, they were injected with an empty syringe.
A spokesperson for Kroger said less than 10 people were affected.
One of them, a man who spoke anonymously to CBS 6, said a Kroger employee first told him he was accidentally given a dose of saline.
“I kind of assumed that the person had taken the wrong bottle out of the fridge, and I remember when I was in the room there seemed to be a number of hypodermic needles that I assumed were full,” he said.
Kroger later clarified that it was not a saline solution, rather an empty needle and that they had initially received misinformation.
“We will have a station of nurses who will take the vaccines from the vials,” said Cat Long, spokesperson for the Richmond-Henrico health districts, explaining the vaccination process at the mass vaccination clinics. “Then after they fill the syringes, they give those vaccines to the nurses who are actually vaccinating people.”
She said Richmond and Henrico had no problem injecting people with empty needles but understood how it could happen.
“The shot is clear so it can be a little hard to tell, I guess, but we had no problem keeping them separate,” Long said.
Kelly Goode, pharmacist and professor at VCU School of Medicine, agrees.
“It can be a little hard sometimes to tell if there’s liquid in there,” Goode said.
To avoid confusing empty syringes with filled syringes, she said pharmacists needed a procedure in place.
“Once you fill it up, it goes to another place so it doesn’t mix unfilled syringes with filled syringes,” Goode explained. “And so you shouldn’t have empty syringes on your counter and then have filled syringes on the same counter, because that’s how mistakes can happen.”
Goode said pharmacists also needed different training on administering the three vaccines, and vaccinators should have been retrained when the Johnson & Johnson dose, which was used at Kroger, became available.
“You will have to learn how this is prepared differently in some of the nuances for the storage of this vaccine, which is a little different from the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine,” Goode said.
Goode also explained that there was no evidence that injecting an empty vaccine into a deltoid muscle, where COVID-19 vaccines go, caused damage because the muscle would absorb air.
Meanwhile, Long stressed that people should trust the vaccination process because problems do not arise often. When they do, Long said the CDC and those affected were immediately notified.
“Although these situations are very serious, they are very rare,” Long said. “We administer thousands of shots a day and have had very few incidents.”
The Virginia Department of Health said Kroger was taking action to prevent this error from happening again.
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