Seattle hospitals rushed out COVID-19 vaccines to hundreds of people in the middle of the night after a freezer they were being stored in failed.
It’s not clear what caused the freezer failure on Thursday night, but the UW Medical Centre’s Northwest and Montlake campuses and Swedish Medical Centre received more than 1,300 doses that needed to be used before they expired at 5:30am on Friday, The Seattle Times reported.
A healthcare worker administers the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to an aged care resident in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, US.Credit:Bloomberg
Word of the unexpected doses spread on social media, and a line of hopeful vaccine recipients snaked out the clinic door and through a parking lot at UW Medical Centre-Northwest. A hundred people lined up at Swedish Medical Centre’s clinic at Seattle University. The hospital tweeted at 11:59pm that it had 588 doses to give out, and within 30 minutes, all the appointment slots had been taken.
At the UW Medical Center-Northwest, assistant administrator Jenny Brackett said the hospital was doing its best to vaccinate those eligible, but that the main objective was to get it into arms and avoid waste.
One woman plucked from the crowd at UW Medical Centre-Northwest, Tyson Greer, 77, said she had been waking up at 1am or 3am for more than a week to search online for coveted vaccination appointments. She finally received a shot at 1am on Friday.
AP
