A report recently revealed that a medical professional, belonging to the health fund in central Israel, was given five to six doses of the Covid-19 vaccine. All these doses were administered in a single inoculation in the last few days.
Soon after receiving the doses, he was taken into hospice. There, he was monitored and later deemed unharmed. Consequently, he was released from the hospital on Monday.
As of now, the Health Ministry has taken the responsibility of investigating the incident. They also released further guidelines to clarify the vaccination process for the medical staff. Officials from the ministry added that care must be taken during the process to ensure that there are no adverse effects.
Generally, people should receive a single dose of the coronavirus vaccine at a time. The next dose is to be administered 21 days after the first. However, the medical professional in question accidentally received a full, undiluted bottle of the vaccine in a single shot.
The Health Ministry later sent a message to all the professional teams working on administering the vaccine. They informed them that an error had occurred in the splitting of the dilution process, prior to the injection stage. Thus, they recommended that one nurse should be in charge of performing the dilution and eventually, administering the injection.
The Ministry warned that the doses of the coronavirus vaccine should not be prepared in advance. Instead, it should only be processed once the vial of the vaccine is diluted.
The medical staff has also been instructed to maintain proper records. They are to note down the time and date of the dilution clearly and comprehensively. In addition, they are to use a non-erasable pen so that the records cannot be altered.
A vial of diluted vaccine can be utilized for nearly six hours, given that it is kept at room temperature. However, a minute after the allotted hours and the bottle should be destroyed right away.
By Sunday evening, more than 200,000 vaccination appointments had been set up in HMOs all over the State of Israel. These were booked by senior citizens and medical staff. 10,000 of the total medical professionals in the country have already received vaccinations.
In other news, the Israel Biological Institute has now moved up to Phase II of its clinical trials for their vaccine candidate, Brilife. This good news was announced on Monday by the Hadassah-University Medical Center.
As part of the second phase of the clinical trial, the head of the Hadassah, Prof. Zeev Rotstein, also received a shot of the Israeli-designed coronavirus vaccine. He expressed that the institute is trying to ensure that a blue-and-white vaccine is developed by joining forces with the Biological Institute.
The professor added that it is important for him to be a part of the volunteers of Phase II, in order to achieve and develop the complete results of the research. Thus, the Biological Institute has asked for participants who are not young and fully healthy.