The federal government is working with Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers to reduce the number of doses per vial, amid growing concerns about wasted vaccines.
from March through August — and has raised questions about the decision to continue distributing Covid vaccines in multi-dose vials, which offer less flexibility to providers as they focus on getting shots to the people who are hardest to reach.
“Is now the time to rethink packaging? For the U.S. market, I think so,” said Prashant Yadav, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a nonprofit think tank, who is an expert in health care supply chains.Most vaccines in the United States are distributed in single-dose vials or prefilled syringes, but the Covid vaccines were distributed in multi-dose vials because of the need to manufacture them quickly in the early months of the country’s inoculation campaign.
While the multi-dose vials — up to 15 doses for Moderna, six for Pfizer-BioNTech and five for Johnson & Johnson — streamline production, they also make the Covid vaccine more vulnerable to waste. A review of state-level reports on discarded doses showed how this occurs. Ten doses were wasted when the Indian Health Service received a broken Moderna vial in late January, for example. And in Barry County, Michigan, nine doses were wasted in May when workers opened a Moderna vial for one patient and couldn’t find other recipients.
In all, over a third of the discarded doses from March through August were wasted in increments smaller than a full vial, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number almost certainly includes some wasted doses not caused by multi-dose vials — for example, when a needle broke or a filled syringe went unused. But the CDC data and the anecdotal reports from states both point to multi-dose vials being more prone to waste.
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