Here’s why thousands of doses of COVID-19 vaccine have gone to waste in NC

When this first began there were a number of businesses that would not use a complete vial for their appointed vaccinations and threw the rest out. Eventually, walk ins were vaccinated without an appointment to assure that waste was minimized.

LTC Eugene Chu
..."Those 1.4 million doses as of last week account for 8 percent of the more than 18 million that North Carolina providers have received, according to figures provided by the state Department of Health and Human Services.

That rate is actually better than the national average of about 9.5 percent, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in published reports last week.

The pace of wasting doses has accelerated: more than 1.2 million of those doses were tossed out in the past seven months. CBS 17 News previously reported more than 254,000 doses were wasted as of early August.

And it’s a national problem: Nearly 1.5 million doses in Michigan, 1 million in Illinois and nearly three-quarters of a million in Washington had to be discarded.

It’s also inevitable, with demand plunging for a product that has a limited shelf life — either because expiration dates approach quickly or because the number of people getting those shots doesn’t always neatly match the number of doses in a five- or 10-dose vial."...