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This email is being sent to COVID-19 Vaccine Providers, Covid-19 Vaccine Local Heath Jurisdiction Partners and Emergency Response contacts.
Dear COVID-19 Vaccine Providers,
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) continues to encourage providers to take every opportunity to vaccinate. Therefore, providers should not miss vaccination opportunities and open a vial to administer doses even if the entire vial cannot be utilized and results in waste.
Identifying Waste
You should make every effort to reduce wastage in your vaccine program. However, it is important to identify doses as waste in order to make sure the vaccines you administer to patients are safe and effective. Vaccine may be identified as waste if:
- There is a temperature excursion. You must monitor COVID-19 vaccine temperatures with a digital data logger (DDL) during storage and transport. If the DDL shows the vaccines were out of temperature range, you may need to declare them as waste. Contact the vaccine manufacturer to see if you can still use the vaccine.
- You don’t use a punctured vial in time. After you puncture a COVID-19 vaccine vial, you must use all doses in the vial within a certain timeframe (the exact time depends on the vaccine product and temperature).
- Your syringes can’t get the last dose in the vial. Pfizer vaccine vials contain six doses, but you need a low dead-volume syringe to access the sixth dose. You cannot combine vaccine from multiple vials to make a dose.
- The vaccine is expired. You should always check the vaccine expiration date before preparing or administering vaccine.
- The vaccine shipment arrived damaged. You should check the vaccine shipments as soon as they arrive. If the temperature went out of range or the DDL wasn’t activated, you should store the vaccine, mark it as “do not use,” and contact the manufacturer for guidance.
Disposing of Waste
You should dispose of COVID-19 vaccine waste in accordance with local regulations and processes for disposal of regulated medical waste.
Reporting Waste
You should report any vaccine wastage to the Washington State Immunization Information System (WAIIS) by following the How to Report COVID-19 Vaccine Wastage guide (PDF).
Recent WAIIS Slowness
The WAIIS is experiencing intermittent slow response times and connectivity issues. Most immunization data submitted through HL7 interfaces has been processing, but not as quickly as expected, which may cause connections to drop. Our vendor support teams have been actively investigating and working to resolve the issue. At this time, we do not have an estimate on when a resolution will be available.
We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.
How to opt out of Ancillary Kits
The Washington State Department of Health understands there are challenges regarding storage capacity for ancillary kits. Therefore, as of 1/31/2022 providers will be able to opt out of receiving COVID-19 ancillary kits.
To opt out of the COVID-19 ancillary kit, the provider must:
- Include a comment in the comments section of the order screen within the Immunization Information System (IIS) as seen below and submit the order as normal.
- The comment applied to the order will not continue to roll over to the following orders placed by the provider within the IIS so providers must opt out of the ancillary kit with each order that is placed.
As a reminder, COVID-19 Vaccine orders are approved on Mondays and Thursdays. To limit the chance of error, requests for opting out of the ancillary kits are being limited to what is received within the IIS. Please do not email opt out requests.
Once the order is submitted to CDC, ancillary kits cannot be returned to the distributor. Please do not return the kits to the distributor. Attempting to return extra kits may result in ordering permissions being revoked.
Please send any questions or concerns to COVID.vaccine@doh.wa.gov.
In partnership,
COVID-19 Vaccine Program
Prevention and Community Health Division
Washington State Department of Health
COVID.vaccine@doh.wa.gov
360-236-3873 | www.doh.wa.gov
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