Some local Safeway pharmacies are distributing the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.

Mike Mozart / Flickr

Government contractor Rob Towner, 36, breathed into a surgical mask Monday while a technician jabbed his right arm with a COVID-19 vaccine.

“Excellent, I appreciate that,” he says in a video he posted to Twitter.

With that shot, Towner joined the lucky few in the District who got a vaccine by waiting for leftover doses. Towner is not a healthcare worker — if he were, he would be first in line to receive the free vaccine. He’s not old enough to qualify for the second wave of residents 65 years old and older. Instead, he benefited from a quirk in the vaccination process: leftover Moderna vaccines expire too quickly for pharmacists to use them the following day and cannot be refrozen.

“There were stories about how in Israel, that if there were leftover vaccines, that technicians … would grab an Uber driver or a food delivery person.” Towner tells DCist/WAMU. “Then I began to see in Washington, D.C., to my surprise that there were Giant and Safeway locations where the pharmacists were effectively doing the same thing.”

With that, Towner, of Arlington, Va., says he called the Safeway nearest his office, on 4th St. SW. He arrived at 2 p.m. and waited. In the evening, Towner says he was delighted to learn that there were eight extra doses: enough for him to get his first of the two shots the vaccine requires. He says he will receive his second dose on Feb. 1.

Towner is one of a handful of people in the area who say they received leftover doses of the coronavirus vaccine from local pharmacies. The vast majority of people getting vaccinated now are health care workers and others included in Phase 1A of the District’s vaccine distribution plan, but Towner’s story and others touched off speculation on social media — and quite a few phone calls to local pharmacies — on Tuesday.

Reached by phone early Tuesday afternoon, an employee at the same Safeway pharmacy Towner visited said 20 people were already waiting in line.

D.C. has received about 40,000 doses of vaccines as of Monday and administered about 17,000 at hospitals, long term care facilities, and pharmacies.

The D.C. Department of Health did not respond to questions about the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in the city.

Meedie Bardonille, a nurse and the chair of the D.C. Board of Nursing, says she supports pharmacies distributing extra doses at the end of the day rather than tossing them in the trash.

“It’s kind of like if you thawed out a packet of hot dogs,” she says. “You’re assuming your friends are coming over to eat, and then three of your friends cancel at the last moment and don’t show up.”

Both Safeway and Giant are distributing vaccines in D.C., and both acknowledged the challenge of unexpected extra doses.

In a statement, the Boise-based Safeway supermarket and pharmacy chain says, “We are working closely with the D.C. Department of Health to administer COVID-19 vaccines to high-risk individuals in Phase 1A of the vaccine rollout, and are making every effort to administer any leftover vaccine to priority patient populations to ensure the broadest vaccine distribution in accordance with Department of Health guidelines.”

Daniel Wolk, a spokesperson for Landover, Md.,-based Giant Food, whose five D.C. pharmacies are vaccinating health care workers, tells DCist/WAMU in an email that in the rare case that a health worker misses a scheduled appointment, pharmacists should offer the vaccine to Giant employees first, then customers 65 and older, and then any adult customers. There is no waitlist, he says.

“The DC Department of Health has made it clear to Giant that if doses of the Moderna vaccine will expire, they should be administered to anyone willing to take it,” Wolk wrote. “The Moderna vaccine is valuable and lifesaving, and we are happy to not waste it by giving doses to our associates and customers should a healthcare worker not show up for their appointment.”

Having extra doses due to no-shows has been rare so far in D.C., per Wolk.

“Most of the time the healthcare worker that has an appointment has shown up for his or her appointment,” he writes.

Izzy, a 30-year-old D.C. resident who works in tech, says she saw stories of people like Towner who got extra vaccine doses and called around to five local pharmacies — three in D.C. and two in Fairfax County — to see if they had waitlists. (She declined to share her last name because she didn’t want this story to appear in an Internet search for her.)

None did. A worker at the Safeway on Georgia Ave NW told her the pharmacy had previously offered a waitlist, but had discontinued the practice after the list ballooned to 200 names. After a long wait, someone at the Giant in Columbia Heights said the pharmacy there never had a waitlist, but were distributing extra doses of the vaccine to employees and elderly customers. The two stores in Fairfax County did not yet have vaccine doses at all.

Izzy says she was motivated to make the calls out of concern that precious vaccine doses might be wasted. She wasn’t disappointed when she came up empty.

“Friends of mine and health care providers are getting vaccinated and that’s great, and that’s what needs to happen first,” she says. “I don’t think that I need to be in front of the line. … I just didn’t want vaccine [doses] tossed.”

In fact, Izzy says she’s concerned that the chatter on social media about extra vaccine doses could result in an avalanche of phone calls to already-busy area pharmacies.

“I felt guilty pretty quickly, because I was looking at the tweets and realizing, ‘Oh, no, they’re probably getting bombarded,’” she says.

But it was an exciting windfall for those who lucked into getting a shot.

Mark Sussman, a 36-year-old street safety advocate, called his local Safeway in Capitol Hill on Saturday and asked if he and his wife could get on a waitlist for unused vaccine.

“I was like, well, I can bike there in like two minutes,” Sussman says.

He said a pharmacy worker took down his name and phone number — and on Monday the couple got a call back. If they came in that night, they could get a first dose of the Moderna vaccine.

Sussman says he and his wife rushed to the pharmacy, about four blocks from his home. There, he showed his D.C. driver’s license and insurance card and got a jab in his arm — and then walked around the store with his infant daughter for 15 minutes, a pharmacy precaution in case any serious side effects developed. The pharmacy gave him a vaccination card with information about a second dose next month.

Sussman was floored by his good luck. But even with the vaccine, Sussman says he doesn’t expect his family’s approach to the pandemic to change much — besides possibly seeing his parents sooner. His mother, a health care worker, will receive her first dose this week. Still, he plans to remain cautious by staying home, wearing masks and social distancing, in part because it’s still unknown if vaccinated people might still be able to transmit the disease.

Still, he says, “it’s pretty surreal. It’s like having a secret superpower, almost.”

Filed Under: coronavirus, covid-19, COVID-19 vaccine, Health Hub,