A solution that provides thousands of doses of Corona vaccine

As millions in the United States line up to get vaccinated against the emerging coronavirus, health officials are struggling to meet rising demand, as a result of a supply shortage.

Speaking to NBC News, Melanie Masia White, director of pharmacy for Inova Medical Foundation, a network of nonprofit hospitals based in Northern Virginia, said the vaccine has become “more valuable than liquid gold.”

And some pharmacists claim that a simple solution could lead to providing additional vaccines to thousands of people each week, but the Food and Drug Administration stands in the way.

The proposal is based on the so-called “bundling”, which is not a new concept, since pharmacists have traditionally resorted to it in everything, be it with regard to flu vaccines, or some chemotherapeutic drugs, or antibiotics, and it is based on collecting what is left in a vaccine vial and integrating it with the rest in another vial, to produce a full dose.

There’s not much left at the bottom of the bottle, “Stephen Jones, Innova’s CEO, told NBC News,” but in the end, in general, this adds up to a lot of doses that end up in waste and not allowed. We can use this additional vaccine. “

“Sometimes a nearly full dose is left at the bottom of the bottle, and it’s heartbreaking to let it go to waste,” Jones added.

Pharmacists at “Innova”, one of the largest hospital systems in the US metropolitan area, say they have started to notice large amounts of residual vaccine in almost every vial, even after using the additional sixth dose in the vials from Pfizer, but due to FDA regulations. , They are forced to throw away what is left in the jars.

Each vial contains six full doses of the vaccine, plus an amount equivalent to about half a dose. Members of the medical teams of the newspaper “Innova” ask: “Why can’t we collect the remains?”

The pharmacists of “Innova” conducted an experiment, and it was found that the remnants of the vaccine in 80 vials of a hundred, were enough to manufacture 40 additional complete doses, which means that the hospital that provides 4 thousand vaccines on the day of a typical vaccine can provide an additional 400 vaccines, with the same supply, every day.

But the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) instructions require pharmacists to commit to administering only 6 doses from each vaccine vial and destroying what is left, because Moderna and Pfizer vaccines contain no preservatives. to help stop the growth of microbes, in case the medicine is contaminated with bacteria or other germs.