Offering those doses went “against protocol,” the governor said.
Members of the Kentucky public were lucky enough to be vaccinated against COVID-19 on Christmas night, when local Walgreens stores had additional doses that would have expired.
The overdose was offered to local first aiders, 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 public at this time,” Caruso said in a statement. “We lived in an isolated situation where the amount of vaccine dose requested by the facilities exceeded the real need.”
In a telephone interview with ABC News, Andrew Masterson said he and his wife were fortunate to have been vaccinated serendipitously, and acknowledged that there are many vulnerable Americans still waiting to receive their shot. .
“We were in the right place at the right time,” Masterson said. “I just felt like I had to jump at this opportunity. But I feel really guilty. We were lucky.”
He and his 16-year-old son were shopping on Christmas Eve when a friend who stopped at Walgreens found there were extra doses. The friend immediately thought of the Mastersons, particularly Melissa, Andrew’s wife, who has been battling breast cancer, stage IV, for the second time.
“We ran up there, we ran out of names, we had to get our doctor’s approval to make sure it wasn’t okay for Melissa to take her chemotherapy medication – she waited a while – but then we sit down, we got shot, and five minutes later we went out the door, hopefully, ”Masterson said.
Melissa had been in remission until January, when the cancer returned. It had spread to his spine. She started chemotherapy in April, which Andrew remembers as a frightening moment: chemo can weaken the immune system and Melissa did well while the pandemic caught steam. When hospitals tightened visitation protocols, there was a time when Andrew couldn’t visit her.
Andrew, a local restaurant owner who said he also hired Meals on Wheels, helping to pack and deliver food to the elderly, was worried he would bring the virus home to his wife or one of his dining halls. other risk.
Kentucky is in Phase 1A of vaccine distribution, which only includes health care workers and people in long-term care centers. The state is expected to move to Phase 1B in February, according to the governor.
Although neither Andrew nor Melissa are part of the “1A” vaccine group, when the opportunity presented itself to him, he felt they had to jump on it.
Even after receiving the first dose of the vaccine, the Mastersons have no plans to lower their guard. “We still have an obligation to the general public to, you know, protect our neighbors and friends,” Andrew said. “While we might be safe or immune, we will pretend as if we weren’t.”
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said Monday that pharmacies in both cities had additional doses of vaccine after vaccinations in long-term care centers and that offering those doses to the public went against the protocol. It was not clear how many people without priority had received vaccines.
“I don’t think this was intentional, and we need to understand that in a company so massive that mistakes will occur,” Beshear said. There are procedures to make sure “the next one goes right,” he added.
During an interview with “Good Morning America” on Tuesday, Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, spoke about the difficulty local health departments have in distributing the vaccine without a national plan or funding.
“The biggest problem is putting the state vaccine in people’s arms,” Jha said.
“We’re starting to see health departments that are very stretched in trying to figure out how to get all these vaccines to people and it’s going much slower than I think the federal authorities thought they would.”
William Gretsky of ABC News contributed to this report.
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