Northern California health officials say they were forced to administer hundreds of COVID vaccines after the freezer holding a county's entire allotment lost power. The freezer's compressor failed and so did the failure alarm system.
The outage was discovered at the Adventist Health Ukiah Valley Medical Center in Mendocino County just after 11:30 yesterday morning. Under Centers for Disease Control guidelines, the Moderna vaccine needs to be administered within 12 hours after reaching room temperature. The hospital's medical director says they and the county health department scrambled to get all 830 doses of the vaccine into the arms of staff, patients, and nursing home residents.