When a vaccine freezer failure in California’s Mendocino County put a two-hour use-or-lose deadline on 830 anti-COVID-19 doses, the hospital staff went on scramble — to an elder-care facility, a county jail, firefighters, the police, essential workers, and every healthcare professional they could grab, to get the shots into what warm bodies were reachable.
[T]he medical team made the decision that the goal would be to inject every dose, regardless of state guidelines [because] “the more people we vaccinate just brings us closer to herd immunity...”
That was Monday, January 5. On Christmas Day, a power outage had put Waterbury, Connecticut on the same kind of scramble. They too had decided, “The prospect of even one dose being wasted is one dose too many.”
By the time Ukiah hit deadline, every dose had found a patient.
But the next morning brought new trouble:
conspiracy theories had begun to circulate:
Some said a pharmacist had purposefully disconnected the power, then took the doses to his church to give to parishioners. Another theory suggested hospital leadership staged it as a secret way of giving shots to friends and family first. Some community members were upset that more had not been done to reach those meant to be in the first tier of distribution.
“I’ve never dealt with a conspiracy theory up close and personal,” said one person involved in the vaccine distribution, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “It never occurred to me that this could get out of hand so quickly.”
The person, a longtime resident of Ukiah, describes the local population as “old hippies and descendants of very conservative farmers,” who share outrage about special treatment for any particular group.
“I think it ties into all the craziness that legitimately exists about people who get special handling,” the person said….
Good to know that wild-eyed liberals and squint-eyed conservatives can agree on at least something, isn’t it? 😁 Maybe next time it’ll be sturdier common ground.
...latimes.com/...2021-01-04/...
Seriously, though, I didn’t include the several other reports around the country of losses of vaccines where officials were not as quick-thinking and not as personally quick-acting as the folks in Ukiah were, and/or not as ready to depart from who’s-spoze-to-be-first protocol in order o ensure that not one single dose would go to waste.
Given the impact of the pandemic upon the supply of qualified workers in every area of any nation’s economy, and the even more limited scope of local energy generation, it’s realistic to anticipate that refrigeration fails are going to happen going forward. And there are any number of other vulnerable points in the transport, delivery, and administration, for both first go-round of doses and second go-round, that limited resources might impact badly.
Contingency plans really seem necessary so nothing goes to waste. We know that now. Prepper outlook, in effect. Best to be as public about those plans as possible so that no siege mentalities nor conspiracy theorizing have nourishment to grow.