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Maui Health forced to toss 1,300 Pfizer doses

Maui Health was forced to throw out more than 1,300 doses of the Pfizer vaccine after a refrigerator door failed to properly seal over the weekend, the hospital operator said.

The vaccine, which is kept in an ultra-low temperature freezer at Maui Memorial Medical Center, had been transferred to the fridge on Friday to allow time for the doses to thaw out in preparation for this week’s clinics. Staff discovered the issue when they returned on Monday.

“Our team immediately contacted Pfizer and it was determined that the vials would need to be removed from clinic use and discarded appropriately,” Maui Health said in a news release Tuesday. “The Department of Health was immediately notified, as were our partners at the Healthcare Association of Hawaii.”

Maui Health spokeswoman Tracy Dallarda said that the loss of the doses was due to a mechanical malfunction of the door and not a staff error.

“No one really knows how it happened,” Dallarda said. “For some reason it just stayed slightly ajar.”

The refrigerator is being repaired, but future doses will be stored in an alternative location, Maui Health said.

The hospital still has enough supply of the vaccine to keep current and future appointments as scheduled. Maui Health has thousands of appointments on the books between Maui Memorial and its satellite clinic at the Kaiser Permanente facility in Kihei.

State Department of Health spokesman Brooks Baehr said that since the vaccination rollout began, 2,400 doses have been lost, including 1,386 at Maui Memorial and 1,014 doses “in separate incidents around the state since mid-December.”

For more on the story, see Wednesday’s edition of The Maui News.

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