A broken freezer containing more than seven hundred doses of COVID-19 vaccine could have been catastrophic. Instead, quick thinking and bold action turned a disaster into a bit of a miracle in Seattle. When it became clear that Moderna’s doses would expire quickly, two clinics split the doses and sent, so to speak, the call to arms at night.
In the end, each dose got used to and more than seven hundred lucky Seattle residents moved ahead of the vaccination curve:
Hundreds of people rushed to the University of Seattle and University of Washington clinics Thursday night to try to receive a COVID-19 vaccine before the doses expired.
Spokesmen for Sweden and UW said a freezer storing Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine broke in the Permanent Kaiser and left 1,650 doses of the vaccine at risk of expiration.
Sweden and UW split the doses and began administering them.
“Teams worked vigilantly and in close collaboration overnight and in the morning to make sure all doses were used and that no vaccine was missed,” a Kaiser Permanente representative in Washington said.
Given the highly regulated environment in which this effort took place, this agile and fast action is even more impressive. We’ve already heard stories of doses breaking down, accidentally or in more suspicious circumstances, and we should expect at least the previous type of hiccups to occur occasionally. Normally, the regulations and sanctions for violating them could have left the doses in the trash, as this first stage of vaccination does not exactly reward thinking outside the box.
For example, as more than one person pointed out on Twitter, Andrew Cuomo’s draconian sanctions for vaccinating outside of his rigid regime would never have produced this kind of untimely work. Hundreds of people would never have received these doses. Instead, given room for innovation and creative thinking, Seattle health care providers turned a failure into an alarming success, all between 11pm and 2.30pm.
The men and women who took these steps to protect their community and get the most out of every dose of these endangered doses deserve praise. Hopefully we’ll start seeing enough of these doses soon, so we don’t have to follow rigid distribution models.
Addenda: Also consider where it took place, in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. It was there that the anarchists seized several blocks of the city in June and created the CHAZ – Capitol Autonomous Zone. Imagine if the city still tolerated this when it happened. Innovation and creativity require public order and stability, as well as space to make quick decisions without draconian sanctions.