Offering those doses was “against protocol,” the governor said.
Members of the Kentucky public were lucky enough to get vaccinated against COVID-19 on Christmas Eve when local Walgreens stores had extra doses that would have expired.
The excess doses were offered to local counselors, Walgreens staff and residents of Louisville and Lexington, many of whom were over 65, according to Walgreens spokesman Phil Caruso.
“COVID-19 vaccines are not available to the general public at this time,” Caruso said in a statement. “We have experienced an isolated situation where the amount of vaccine doses requested by facilities exceeded the real need.”
In a phone interview with ABC News, Andrew Masterson said he and his wife were lucky enough to have gotten the vaccine by accident – acknowledging that there are still many vulnerable Americans waiting for their injection.
“We were in the right place at exactly the right time,” said Masterson. “I just felt I should take this opportunity. But I feel very guilty. We were just lucky.”
He and his 16-year-old son were shopping last minute on Christmas Eve when a friend who happened to pass by Walgreens found that extra doses were available. The friend immediately thought of the Mastersons – in particular, Melissa, Andrew’s wife, who is fighting breast cancer for the second time, stage IV.
“We rushed there, they wrote down our names, we had to get our doctor’s approval to make sure it was okay for Melissa to take her chemo medication – waited a while – but then sat down and got the injection, and five minutes later we walked out the door hopefully, ”Masterson said.
Melissa had been in remission until January, when the cancer came back. It had spread to her spine. She started chemotherapy in April – which Andrew remembers as a scary time: Chemo can weaken the immune system, and Melissa got on well when the pandemic took off. When hospitals tightened their visitor protocols, there was a time when Andrew couldn’t visit her.
Andrew, a local restaurant owner who said he has also contracted with Meals on Wheels to pack and deliver seniors’ meals, feared he would bring the virus to his wife – or one of his high-risk meals.
Kentucky is in Phase 1A of vaccine distribution, which only includes health professionals and people in long-term care facilities. According to the governor, the state is expected to move to Phase 1B in February.
While neither Andrew and Melissa are in the ‘1A’ vaccine group, he felt that when given the chance, they should jump on it.
Even after receiving the first dose of the vaccine, the Mastersons do not intend to let their guard down. “We still have an obligation to the general public to, you know, protect our neighbors and our friends,” Andrew said. “Even though we may be safe or immune, we pretend we aren’t.”
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said Monday that pharmacies in both cities had additional doses of the vaccine after vaccinations in long-term care facilities and that offering those doses to the public was in violation of protocol. It was unclear how many people had received vaccines without priority.
“I don’t think this was intentional, and we have to understand that mistakes are going to happen in such a massive undertaking,” said Beshear. There are procedures in place to ensure that “the right thing is done next time,” he added.
During an interview with “Good Morning America” on Tuesday, Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean at Brown University School of Public Health, on the difficulties local health departments have in distributing the vaccine without a national plan or funding.
“The biggest problem is getting the vaccine from the United States into the arms of the people,” said Jha.
“We’re starting to see health departments that are very tense, have to try to figure out how to get all these vaccines into humans, and it’s going much slower than I think the federal authorities thought.”
William Gretsky of ABC News contributed to this report.
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