B.C. has destroyed 650,000-plus doses of COVID vaccines since start of campaign
B.C. has thrown out more than 650,000 doses of COVID -19 vaccines, or about five per cent of the 12 million doses received from the federal government since the start of B.C's immunization campaign.
It's frustrating news for medical professionals who have been fighting since the start of the vaccination campaign to administer shots to their clients, some of whom have avoided official government vaccine clinics.
“It breaks my heart,” Dr. Brian Conway, the medical director of the Vancouver Infectious Diseases Centre, which has a medical team that provides health services directly to vulnerable people in the Downtown Eastside. “It is completely at odds with the message that we've been trying to get out that vaccination is important.”
Conway has been asking the Health Ministry for the power to administer COVID -19 vaccines to those living in single-room-occupancy buildings since the start of the vaccination campaign but to no avail. Two weeks ago, his clinic was finally granted the power to administer COVID vaccines.
Since then, his medical outreach team has had success immunizing unvaccinated people or those without a third dose, Conway said, because they can administer the shots right in people's rooms rather than sending them to a vaccination clinic.
“We kept sharing (with provincial health officials) that some people weren't attending vaccination clinics in the Downtown Eastside,” Conway said.
Conway said the province led a “heroic effort” to immunize more than four million British Columbians but more could have been done to partner with community clinics eager to help. The province's Health Ministry said the two-dose vaccination rate for adults 18 and older in Vancouver-Centre North, which includes the Downtown Eastside, was 91 per cent which is in line with vaccine coverage across B.C.
The expiration date on a particular batch of vaccines is wellknown, Conway said, so B.C. health officials should have been able to estimate the number of surplus doses about to expire. These are doses that could have donated to developing countries through the COVAX global vaccine sharing program, he said.
Dr. Penny Ballem, who leads the vaccine rollout for the province, said given the thousands of people involved in transporting COVID vaccines to the far reaches of the province and administering doses at hundreds of pharmacies and vaccination clinics, the number of vaccines wasted is not surprising.
There are two reasons why vaccine doses would be destroyed, Ballem said. The first is the vaccine is past the manufacturer's expiry date. A total of 357,620 doses were thrown out in B.C. since December 2020 because they expired.
Another 307,211 doses were thrown out due to “loss,” Ballem said. That means the vaccine could not be used because it had been thawed for too long, thawed to an unsafe level during transport or not all doses in a vial were used in time.
B.C.'s immunization team was in a race against time as they arranged the transport of vaccines to remote communities by float plane and boat, Ballem said. There's also some guesswork around the number of people in a given community who will get the vaccine, which sometimes is an overestimate.
Pfizer and Moderna, mRNA vaccines, must be stored at extremely cold temperatures. Once they thaw, there's about a month-long window before the vial expires. Vaccines must be thawed in controlled conditions at B.C.'s central distribution centres, Ballem said, which starts the count down on the one-month shelf life.
There are also several doses in each vial — six doses in each vial of Pfizer vial and 10 in each Moderna vial. Once a vial is punctured, all doses must be used within six hours.
If only one person comes in for a COVID jab at a low-traffic clinic on a given day, the remaining doses in the vial will go to waste.
“The lower the volume (of people) at each clinic, the more wastage you're going to have,” she said.
Dr. Madhu Jawanda, a family doctor in Surrey and member of the South Asian COVID task force, said some vaccine waste could have been minimized by giving family doctors the ability to immunize their patients.
“It would have been really nice if certain family doctors had access to these vaccines,” Jawanda said, but added B.C.'s rate of five per cent vaccine wastage is to be expected given the complex logistics.
B.C. Liberal health critic Shirley Bond said the province's vaccine waste should be among the topics investigated through an independent review of the province's pandemic response. The opposition has been calling for an independent review with no commitment from the government.
B.C. Green Leader Sonia Furstenau said she's concerned about the lack of transparency around waste and how many doses B.C. has returned to the federal government or donated to developing countries through the COVAX global vaccine sharing program.
B.C. sent 1.56 million doses to the COVAX vaccine program, Ballem said. Those were doses allocated to B.C. but never left federal government warehouses because of a surplus in supply.