Zvi, I live in the UK and back in February I had asked my GP to please call me if they had any spare doses.
Well, my GP called me on the evening of the 7th of March, telling me that they had an open vial of Astrazeneca, and to come down if I could. I asked if I could also bring my partner, he said “sure, there’s more than one dose in there and we close in 20 minutes”. So I did get vaccinated before 60 years old were even eligible, and so did my partner. For the record, I am 29 and in perfect health, and she is 23 and not even a patient of that GP. This happened to many other people I know, and I have seen even more of that on social media. My understanding is that, while the policy is clear, GPs do have a lot of freedom in trying to avoid wasting vaccines.
My guess about the thing you reported… is that some GPs misunderstood guidelines. I wasn’t able to find the official ones, though (I suspect those might not be publicly available).
One more point: given how doses work each GP could theoretically “risk to waste” (and hence give to any passerby) at most 9 doses of Astrazeneca, and 5 doses of Pfizer per day (the number of doses you get from a vial minus one). That doesn’t seem like a huge number to me. Any bigger “abuse” of the system (i.e. give doses to people before it’s their turn) would still be detected quite easily.
Zvi, I live in the UK and back in February I had asked my GP to please call me if they had any spare doses.
Well, my GP called me on the evening of the 7th of March, telling me that they had an open vial of Astrazeneca, and to come down if I could. I asked if I could also bring my partner, he said “sure, there’s more than one dose in there and we close in 20 minutes”.
So I did get vaccinated before 60 years old were even eligible, and so did my partner. For the record, I am 29 and in perfect health, and she is 23 and not even a patient of that GP.
This happened to many other people I know, and I have seen even more of that on social media. My understanding is that, while the policy is clear, GPs do have a lot of freedom in trying to avoid wasting vaccines.
My guess about the thing you reported… is that some GPs misunderstood guidelines. I wasn’t able to find the official ones, though (I suspect those might not be publicly available).
One more point: given how doses work each GP could theoretically “risk to waste” (and hence give to any passerby) at most 9 doses of Astrazeneca, and 5 doses of Pfizer per day (the number of doses you get from a vial minus one). That doesn’t seem like a huge number to me. Any bigger “abuse” of the system (i.e. give doses to people before it’s their turn) would still be detected quite easily.