NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) – As millions await their turn for the COVID-19 vaccine, small but steady amounts of the precious doses have been lost across the country.
It’s a heartbreaking reality that experts recognized was always likely to occur. Thousands of shots have been wasted in Tennessee, Florida, Ohio and many other states. The reasons range from careless record-keeping to accidentally discarding hundreds of photos. However, it remains largely unknown how many of the life-saving bottles have been thrown away, despite assurances from many local officials that the number remains low.
Certainly, waste is common in global vaccination campaigns, throwing out millions of doses of flu shots every year. According to an estimate by the World Health Organization, as many as half of the vaccines in previous campaigns have been thrown away worldwide because they have been abused, unclaimed, or expired.
In comparison, waste of the COVID-19 vaccine appears to be quite small, although the US government has not yet released figures that provide insight into its magnitude. Officials have promised that this may change soon as more data is collected from the states.
In the meantime, state health agencies are much more likely to report how quickly they delivered the injections, while making sure Mom knows the number of doses that end up in the trash.
The Ohio Department of Health opposed the use of the term “wasted” when The Associated Press asked him for a total number of wasted doses. Instead, a spokesman for the agency said the state is tracking down “unusable” vaccines reported by state suppliers.
“With 3.2 million doses delivered on March 9, 2021, the 3,396 inoperable doses reported by state-owned companies make up about 0.1% of the doses administered – less than the CDC expectation of 5% inoperable doses,” Alicia Shoults, a Ohio department of Health spokesman, said in an email.
According to a log provided by the department, Ohio suppliers reported nearly 60 incidents where doses were not used. The biggest incident occurred earlier this year when a pharmacy responsible for distributing the vaccine to nursing homes failed to record storage temperatures for leftover injections, resulting in 890 doses being lost.
In Tennessee, wasted, tainted, or unused doses are not made public on the state’s online COVID-19 vaccine dashboard. However, after nearly 4,500 doses of Tennessee were screwed up in February, the state’s Department of Health tried to look for answers.
It began with nearly 1,000 doses reported missing in East Tennessee’s Knox County, where emotional local leaders told reporters that a shipment had been accidentally thrown away by an employee who thought the box contained dry ice.
Soon after, just over 2,500 doses were reported as wasted in Shelby County – which includes Memphis. A state inquiry concluded that the dazzling spoilage occurred after multiple incidents due to substandard pharmacy practices, a lack of standard operating procedures for storage and handling, disorganized administration, and inadequate management of soon-expiring vaccine doses.
A separate 1,000 doses were then reported as tainted in central Tennessee after a school district reported a storage error.
Despite the recent series of wasted vaccine incidents, the health service stressed that the number represents only a fraction of the nearly 1.9 million doses the state has received since December.
“We don’t believe there is a statewide systemic problem, but just to be on the safe side, we’re stepping up our compliance efforts,” Lisa Piercey, health commissioner, told reporters earlier this month.
Piercey said Tennessee will soon be evaluating the state’s vaccine distribution efforts to avoid future waste, eventually hiring a separate company to conduct quality controls.
Meanwhile, Surgeon General Dr. Scott Rivkees recently called for an audit in Florida after more than 1,000 doses of vaccine were reported damaged in Palm Beach County last month. When asked to review that audit, the state said this week that it would provide those documents through a request for public records – which he was still drafting.
Like other states, Florida does not regularly publish how many doses fail to reach the arms, but a state health service spokesman said 4,435 doses had been reported as wasted as of Monday.
In Louisiana, health officials provide updated totals of wasted doses to reporters at the governor’s weekly COVID-19 briefing. Of the 1.2 million vaccine doses administered so far, less than 1,500 were wasted Tuesday, said Dr. Joe Kanter, the governor’s chief public health adviser.
The Ohio Health Department reported that as of February 2,349 doses were wasted or spoiled. Officials stress that the amount wasted is extremely low compared to the total doses that have ended up in the arms. However, they note that this does not make the situation any less troubling.
“Here’s the bottom line: this stuff is gold,” said Julie Willems van Dijk, deputy secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. “I think any vaccinator who touches a bottle of Pfizer, Moderna or J&J knows. … I’ve spoken to people with this wasted vaccine and they are devastated. “
The federal government has also delayed releasing amounts of tainted or unusable doses, although it says states must report such waste in its vaccine tracker.
“We are in the process of figuring out how to provide this data online in the future when the data is more complete,” Kristen Nordlund, a spokesperson for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, said in an email.
Associated Press writers Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee, Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin, Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Andrew Welsh-Higgins in Columbus, Ohio contributed to this report.