THE BUREAUCRATIC MENTALITY IS THE ONLY CONSTANT IN THE UNIVERSE: Pharmacists Wonder: When Are We Going To Stop Throwing Out All These Vaccine Doses?

Ever since the vaccines began rolling out, we’ve heard far too many stories of large numbers of doses being discarded. Some cases have been from intentional spoilage by bad actors and conspiracy theory junkies. Others have been caused by refrigeration equipment failures or just simple human error. But it turns out that an even larger number of doses are going into the waste bin every week without any of those things happening. NBC News has a distressing report out this week revealing that healthcare workers are increasingly dismayed by the high number of doses that wind up being discarded while people are still waiting on line for a jab. The reason is that when they get down near the end of a vial, they are not allowed to use a process known as “pooling” to avoid wasting the precious liquid. The result is that for every shipment of 80 vials, forty full doses of the vaccine wind up in the trash. And they’re blaming the FDA.

“Get the hell out of my way!” the wise man once said.