At least 112 Virginia children were given wrong doses of COVID-19 vaccines after a local pharmacy tried to make up for not having the new shots for kids, according to local officials.
Ted Pharmacy in Aldie “incorrectly administered” partial doses of adult vaccines to the kids, the Loudoun County Health Department said. “Because they did not have the children’s formulation they used the adult formulation but only gave a third of the amount to the children,” the health department’s director, David Goodfriend, told the Washington Post.
“Our understanding from Ted Pharmacy is they were trying to do a workaround, which is not authorized,” he said. “If it doesn’t all go in, or it goes into the body but doesn’t go into the muscle, or you didn’t draw it up exactly to the [correct] line, there’s a chance you might get too little vaccine,” he said.
Goodfriend went onto say that it’s unlikely a child would have been harmed by receiving too much of the vaccine, but it’s possible that children can be under-vaccinated if they receive too little.
The issue was discovered Nov. 4, Goodfriend said. “It was a good observant parent, as I understand it, that brought it to the Virginia Department of Health’s attention.”
Families nationwide have been frantically trying to get their young children vaccinated ahead of the holidays. About 28 million children became newly eligible for smaller doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine after federal authorities gave the green light this month.
In the clinical trial, the vaccine was shown to be safe and more than 90 percent effective for children ages 5 to 11 during a time when the delta variant was the dominant strain, according to the vaccine manufacturer.
