Why are thousands of vaccines ending up in the trash in the US?

By Corky Siemaszko - NBC News

A COVID-19 vaccination team at a hospital shows up at the emergency room to vaccinate employees who have not received their injections.

Finding only a few employees, the vaccinators prepare to leave when an emergency physician suggests that the remaining doses be administered to vulnerable patients or non-health workers at the center.

The vaccinators refuse, arguing that

this would violate hospital policy and state guidelines.

Outraged, the doctor turns to a higher-ranking official at the hospital, who gives the go-ahead for the vaccinators to use the rest of the doses.

But by then, the team of vaccinators has already left and, following protocols, the remaining doses end up in the trash.

Is this an isolated incident?

Well, it's not, Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, told NBC News, the sister network of Noticias Telemundo.

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"This kind of thing is pretty rampant," Jha said.

“Dozens of medical friends in different states have personally told me stories like this from.

Hundreds (if not thousands) of doses are thrown away across the country every day.

Is incredible."

Jha said the ER doctor whose story he told in a Twitter thread this week asked not to be identified, but his case, which was seen by thousands of people, resonated with other medical professionals frustrated by rules and regulations that they say, they are making it harder for more Americans to vaccinate.

Vaccines have a limited life

Why is this happening?

COVID-19 vaccines have a short shelf life once they are thawed for use, Jha said.

And due to federal and state mandates, hospitals and other health care providers would rather risk a dose going to waste than give it to someone who is not in priority groups for an injection.

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At the same time, states like Massachusetts now have rules that require hospitals to report the number of vaccine doses that have been discarded, Jha said.

"The problem is that hospitals that report this are ridiculed in the press for wasting vaccines," he explained.

"So many hospitals don't report it and this is happening across the country."

While there do not yet appear to be solid figures for how many vaccines have been discarded in the United States since vaccination began last month, the World Health Organization warned in 2005 that up to 50% of vaccines introduced globally each year end. in the dumpster due to supply chain issues such as a lack of freezer space or transportation issues.

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Some of those same issues have clouded the Trump Administration's efforts to implement coronavirus vaccination.

"I hope (and pray) it's not as high as 50%, given the thousands of people who die every day," said Dr. Sadiya Khan, an epidemiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

"While it is an unavoidable reality that a portion of the doses may go to waste,

careful planning and monitoring will be required to minimize waste

."

Infectious disease expert Dr. John Swartzberg agreed with this point.

"I have not seen any data on how many vaccines have been wasted (other than what I have read in the press)," said Swartzberg, professor emeritus at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Given how necessary they are, I hope the WHO data is wrong."

For Sue Joss, executive director of the Brockton Neighborhood Health Center in Brockton, Massachusetts, one wasted dose of the COVID-19 vaccine is too much.

During Christmas Eve, he said, a staff member who was scheduled to receive the last dose of the 60 Moderna vaccines that had been removed from the cold room that day, did not go to work.

"We can't let this happen again," Joss recalled saying before the unused dose was destroyed.

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Then she put in place a system to make sure that if someone does not show up for an appointment to get vaccinated, someone else is ready and waiting to take their place.

"Now we have a waiting list of people who can come on short notice to inject," he said.

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But that system isn't foolproof either, Joss clarified.

"One time last week, we wandered down the aisles to find a patient willing to get an injection, so that a dose wouldn't go to waste," he said.

Discarded doses around the United States 

Similar stories of unused doses ending up in the trash have also been reported in other parts of the country.

Dozens of doses destined for two hospitals in Portland, Oregon, were scrapped because officials were unable to gather enough healthcare workers to receive the injections before they expired.

In Ohio, three dozen doses ended up in the trash after a Lawrence County nursing home overestimated the number of vaccinations it needed, forcing the pharmacists who administered the injections to find who to give them.

"They did everything they could," Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said.

"They got all the people who wanted to get vaccinated, but they had a little left over, a lot."

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President Donald Trump, whose erratic leadership during the pandemic helped stone his bid for re-election, had promised that 20 million people in the United States would be immunized by the end of 2020.

But

as of Thursday, 30.6 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine had been distributed and only 11.1 million people had received their first doses

, according to the vaccination tracker from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The mass launch of the coronavirus vaccine in the country has been hampered by poor planning, a distribution system that relies heavily on state and local governments for decision-making, and well-intentioned attempts to limit the distribution of the first doses to the most vulnerable populations, which has left unwanted effects.

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Meanwhile, the United States continues to lead the number of infections and deaths in the world, with more than 23 million confirmed cases and almost 387,000 deaths, according to data compiled by NBC News and Johns Hopkins University.