A second California hospital has been arrested for administering the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine to the coronavirus of its employees’ relatives – instead of using the doses for the elderly or front-line workers.
The Southern California hospital allowed its workers to invite relatives to get vaccinated – just as another hospital in the area did last week, provoking criticism.
“The hospital had planned to vaccinate all its employees, but a large number of employees refused and were on a lot of thawed vaccines,” a woman vaccinated at the Southern California Hospital told the Orange County Register. “They offered police officers, firefighters and first responders to get vaccinated and told employees they could invite four family members.”
Culver City Hospital eventually became inundated with requests from the general public and was forced to return only to front-line vaccination workers.
Any decision by a hospital to treat relatives of staff flies in front of the guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control, which requires their inoculation in the later stages of the vaccine launch.
The Southern California hospital is the second unit arrested in Golden State, offering “additional” doses of vaccine to family members.
Earlier this week, a Disney worker in California boasted on Facebook that she was able to get the vaccine because of a father-in-law who was a “big deal” at Redlands Community Hospital.
“After the administration of the doctors and the staff who expressed their interest in the vaccine, there are a few doses left,” the hospital said for the registry. Because the reconstituted Pfizer vaccine should be used within a few hours or discarded, more doses have been given to non-frontline healthcare workers so that the valuable vaccine is not discarded.