Each Day, Vaccine Workers Solve Tricky Math To Keep Doses From Going To Waste

Registered nurse Emily Rice dispenses the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine into syringes for prospective recipients at the Reggie Lewis Center in Roxbury. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

On the edge of the Reggie Lewis Center’s indoor track turned mass vaccination site, Emily Rice barely seems to notice the hundreds of people getting inoculated in front of her. Instead, she’s focused entirely on the tiny vial between her fingertips. In her other hand, she eases the plunger back on a syringe, drawing 0.3 milliliters of the Pfizer vaccine into its chamber.

Rice is a vaccine preparer for CIC Health, which operates the mass vaccination site at Reggie Lewis. All day, she painstakingly fills syringes with the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine. Each vial is supposed to contain five doses, but most actually have one or two extras.

“Just from this vial, I’m on number seven,” she says. “Seven is the max, and it’s hard to get that.”

Similarly, Moderna vials are billed at 10 doses, but they often contain 11. Once a health worker cracks open a vial, the clock is ticking. Moderna and Pfizer vials have six hours before they need to go in the trash. With Johnson & Johnson, there aren’t expected to be extra doses, but the five shots in each vial are good for just two hours at room temperature – six hours with refrigeration.

Read the rest of the story at WBUR’s website.