Alaska’s new COVID-19 vaccine strategy means more flexibility to give shots — and more doses wasted

With more than enough COVID-19 vaccine now available in Alaska and less demand for it statewide, vaccinating all those who want a shot has become easier — but the number of doses being wasted has been increasing in recent weeks too, state health officials say.

Data provided by the state showed that as of May 12, 7,688 vaccine doses, or about 1.38% of doses the state received so far, had to be thrown out.

That’s more than twice as many wasted vaccine doses as was reported less than a month earlier. As of April 20, there had been a total of 2,956 wasted doses, representing just 0.57% of the total doses the state had received since vaccines first became available in December.

State health officials say some of that waste is inevitable — and that it’s part of a new vaccination strategy.

“The idea is to not miss opportunities” to vaccinate “and to be OK with wastage,” said Matt Bobo, immunization program manager with the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services, during a recent call with reporters.

He said the new messaging was shared with providers in April and was echoed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in May.

The approach marks a shift from earlier in the pandemic, when providers were asked to avoid wasting even a single dose of a vaccine in limited supply.

“As we get further along, we’re going to expect increased wastage,” said Dr. Anne Zink, Alaska’s chief medical officer, during the same call.

Partly this is because the currently available COVID-19 vaccines have relatively short windows of time between when vials are thawed and opened, and when they expire, she said.

“For example, when I was in Hyder, there were two more people who needed to get vaccinated,” she said. “So that meant I needed to open another (vial of) Pfizer, which meant that there would be four additional doses” since each vial contains six doses.

Once a vial of Pfizer vaccine is opened, the remaining four doses is usable for only about six hours.

“So do you leave two people there who can’t be vaccinated to save those four doses? Or do you potentially waste four doses, and move on?” she said.

In that particular case, Zink said she was able to find a home for those four doses within those six hours. But the experience highlights the increasing likelihood of wasting some vaccine in order to vaccinate a few people at a time, particularly in small, remote communities like Hyder.

Barbara Norton, a certified nurse midwife who practices at Geneva Woods Birth Center in Anchorage, first heard the messaging that the priority was getting more Alaskans vaccinated — even in cases where that would mean some vaccine was wasted — during a state-run Zoom call for vaccine providers in April. (The clinic has given 1,000 COVID-19 vaccine shots so far.)

“The state was realizing that many of the people who wanted vaccine had already gotten the shot, and that it would be acceptable to waste some vaccine in the service of getting shots in arms,” Norton said in an interview Tuesday.

She said it wasn’t an easy shift to make.

“For the last six months, we’ve been asked to stretch this resource,” she said. “It makes sense, but it’s hard.”

Norton said that so far, Geneva Woods hasn’t had to waste any vaccine, even though they were given permission to do so.

“I feel pretty good about that,” she said.