With over 340 million doses of COVID vaccines being administered in the United States alone already, it likely would have surprising if there hadn’t been a few COVID vaccination errors.
And that’s what we are seeing, very few COVID vaccination errors.
COVID Vaccination Errors
What kind of errors?
Maybe a young child get a COVID vaccine that is not yet authorized for their age.
Or maybe they got the wrong dose or the right dose at the wrong time.
A dose may also have been given that had not been stored properly.
So what do you do in these situations?
It depends on the error, but fortunately, you typically do not have to repeat the dose of vaccine and you would not expect most of these errors to cause any extra side effects.
For all of these types of errors, the CDC provides interim recommendations and advises that health care providers:
- Inform the recipient of the vaccine administration error.
- Consult with your state immunization program and/or immunization information system (IIS) to figure out how the dose should be entered into the IIS, both as an administered dose and to account for inventory.
- Report the COVID-19 vaccine administration error to VAERS, even if it was not associated with an adverse event.
- Figure out how the error occurred and implement strategies so that it doesn’t happen again!
Providers might also report COVID-19 vaccination errors to the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP), as they have been collecting information and providing guidance on reducing these vaccine errors too.
More on COVID Vaccine Errors
- Did You Miss Your Second Dose of COVID Vaccine?
- COVID-19 Vaccination Questions and Answers
- Avoiding the Most Common Vaccine Errors
- When a Vaccine Doesn’t Count and Needs to Be Repeated
- How Long is a Reconstituted Vaccine Good for?
- The New Pfizer COVID Vaccine Storage Guidelines
- Handling Vaccine Storage Problems
- CDC – COVID-19 Vaccine Administration Errors and Deviations
- Learning from Errors with the New COVID-19 Vaccines
- Vaccine card incorrect for single-dose COVID-19 vaccine