MIDLOTHIAN, Va. – As of Thursday night, Kroger still has not provided an explanation as to why several people accidentally received an empty syringe instead of a COVID-19 vaccine at a clinic in Central Virginia.
Several people walked into the Midlothian Kroger on Monday and Tuesday expecting to be vaccinated with the Johnson & Johnson Coronavirus vaccine.
Instead, they were injected with an empty syringe.
A Kroger spokesman said fewer than 10 people have been affected.
One, a man who spoke anonymously to CBS 6, said a Kroger employee initially told him he had accidentally received an injection of saline.
“I kind of assumed the person took the wrong vial from the fridge, and I remember when I was in the room there seemed to be some hypodermic needles that I assumed were full,” he said.
Kroger later clarified that it was not saline, but an empty needle, and that they were initially given misinformation.
“We will have a station of nurses taking vaccines from the vials,” said Cat Long, a spokesperson for the Richmond-Henrico Health Districts, explaining the vaccination process in mass vaccination clinics. “After they fill the syringes, they give those vaccines to the nurses who actually vaccinate the people.”
She said that Richmond and Henrico have had no problems injecting people with empty syringes, but understood how this can happen.
“The recording is clear, so that can be a bit challenging to say, I guess, but we’ve had no problems keeping them separate,” Long said.
Kelly Goode, a pharmacist and professor at VCU medical school, agreed.
“It can be a little hard to tell if there’s liquid in it at times,” Goode said.
To avoid confusing empty syringes with filled syringes, she said pharmacists need a procedure.
“Once you fill it, it moves to another place so you don’t confuse unfilled syringes with filled syringes,” Goode explained. “And so you shouldn’t have empty syringes on your counter and then filled syringes on the same counter, because that can cause mistakes.”
Goode said pharmacists also need different training on how to administer all three vaccines, and vaccinators should have been retrained when the dose of Johnson & Johnson used at Kroger became available.
“You should learn how to prepare that differently in some nuances for the storage of that vaccine, which is a little bit different from the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines,” Goode said.
Goode also explained that there was no evidence that injecting an empty shot into a deltoid muscle, which is where COVID-19 vaccines go, did harm because the muscle would absorb the air.
Meanwhile, Long stressed that people should trust the vaccination process because problems don’t arise often. If they do, Long said the CDC and those affected will be notified immediately.
“While these situations are very serious, they are very rare,” Long said. “We perform thousands of injections a day and have had very few incidents.”
The Virginia Department of Health said Kroger is taking steps to make sure this error doesn’t happen again.