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After a storage freezer broke at a hospital in Northern California on Monday, health care officials were forced to distribute 830 doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine in just 2.5 hours.
Around 11:30 on Monday morning, hospital workers at Adventist Health Ukiah Valley Medical Center in Mendocino County were alerted that a freezer holding the vaccines had stopped working. By 2 p.m., all 830 doses had been administered.
Moderna vaccines need to be shipped and stored at temperatures of 36-46 degrees, and the doses had been sitting at room temperature since 2 a.m., according to the San Francisco Gate. Once the vaccine hits room temperature, it must be used within 12 hours.
The medical staff estimated that they had roughly two hours to distribute the doses while they were still viable.
"It was not how my day was planned," Adventist spokeswoman Cici Winiger told The Los Angeles Times. "At that point, it was all hands on deck, drop everything."
The hospital staff treated the situation as an emergency, and quickly began administering the vials. Around 200 doses first went to the county, which were allotted to health care workers and jail inmates, and 40 more were given to a local elderly care facility.
The remaining 600 doses were rolled out to members of the community.
To do this, the hospital staff sent a text asking every available medical professional to turn out at one of four sites created to distribute the vaccines and monitor those who took them.
They alerted the public through social media, word of mouth, and by placing phone calls to high-risk places such as nursing homes.
"We had nurses, pharmacists, physicians, even those that are not part of the hospital, coming to help," Judson Howe, president for Adventist Health in Mendocino County told The Los Angeles Times."It was all hands on deck and a true community effort."
Though California has initiated a three-phase plan to prioritize when certain residents can receive the vaccine, Adventist hospital staff allowed anyone who showed up to be vaccinated.
"We just told them 'Tell everyone you know,'" Winiger told the newspaper. "We just wanted to make sure none of this goes to waste."
Health care officials began administering the vaccines at an incredible speed, and started rolling out the process by noon, just 30 minutes after the freezer was first discovered to have failed.
Though the circumstance was less than ideal, Winiger told The Los Angeles Times that it gave hope that large-scale vaccination efforts could be performed at impressive speeds.
"It's just amazing to go toward one goal and get it done," Winiger said. "I was just thinking in my head, can you imagine if we had more time to do this? If this is how we do a massive vaccination later, we are golden. We can do this."
Newsweek reached out to Adventist Health Ukiah Valley Medical Center for additional comment but did not hear back in time for publication.
