A second California hospital has been shut down for administering the Pfizer / BioNTech coronavirus vaccine to relatives of its employees – instead of using the doses for the elderly or frontline workers.
The Southern California hospital has allowed its employees to invite relatives for vaccinations – just as another hospital in the area did last week, drawing criticism.
“The hospital had planned to vaccinate all of its employees, but a large number of their employees refused and they were sitting on a lot of thawed vaccines,” a woman vaccinated at Southern California Hospital told the Orange County Register. “#They offered police, firefighters and first responders to get vaccinated, and also told employees they could invite four family members.”
Culver City hospital was eventually inundated with requests from the general public and was forced to simply vaccinate frontline workers.
Any decision a hospital makes to treat loved ones of staff goes against guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control, which require them to be inoculated during later stages of vaccine deployment.
Southern California Hospital is the second destroyed facility in the Golden State to administer “extra” doses of vaccine to family members.
Earlier this week, a Disney employee in California bragged on Facebook that she was able to get the vaccine thanks to a brother-in-law who was a “big deal” at the Redlands Community Hospital.
“# After doctors and staff who expressed interest in the vaccine were administered, several doses were left,” the hospital told the registry. “Because the reconstituted Pfizer vaccine must be used within hours or be thrown away, multiple doses were given to non-frontline healthcare workers so the valuable vaccine was not thrown away.
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