Twomey warns of RC in COVAX waste

COMMUNITY pharmacy owners are being warned not to expose the profession to cri cism by allowing large quan es of COVID-19 vaccines (COVAX) to expire in their fridges.

Delivering an update on the COVAX rollout last night, Pharmacy Guild of Australia Na onal President, Trent Twomey, urged the profession to return stock to the Commonwealth Government before its expiry date.

“We have a lot of excess stock in the network,” he said.

“And whilst there are no financial penal es for you, if the stock expires in your fridge, it doesn’t look good for us as a profession if a lot of this stock is going out of date.

“I really need you to do your profession a ‘solid’, I need you to call the vaccine opera ons centre on that 1800-number and you need to request for your excess AstraZeneca or your excess Moderna stock to be collected.

“Please return the stock, because there will be an audit of this, there will be a postmortem.

“There’s probably going to be a Royal Commission (RC), and I don’t want community pharmacy to open itself up to cri cism, as other areas of primary healthcare will - I don’t worry about them, I’m not their president - but I don’t want us to be opened up to cri cism that we had a lot of stock expiring in our fridges.”

Under current arrangements the Commonwealth has said it will only collect unused stock if the pharmacy is returning at least 20 vials of the AstraZeneca, or 10 vials of the Moderna vaccine from individual pharmacies.

MEANWHILE, Twomey noted that a number of pharmacies have experienced issues when receiving stock of the Moderna vaccine that had been defrosted up to 10 days before it was delivered, giving them less than three weeks before the stock expires.

“The Guild has been advoca ng and aggita ng on your behalf,” Twomey said.

“We have been able to reach an agreement where remote pharmacies to start with - and I’m hoping we can roll this out to all pharmacies in Australia - will begin to receive their stock frozen.

“If the Moderna stock lands at your pharmacy frozen, of course you’ll remember from your training that if you pop that in your vaccine accredited fridge, which is at 2 to 8%C, your 30 days then cks over 12 hours later.”