Almost 600 people in Colorado need to be revaccinated for Covid-19 after they received expired doses, the state’s Department of Public Health and Environment has said.
In a press release on Monday night, state public health officials said that Bloom Healthcare, a provider in Denver, had given out 585 Moderna vaccines that were past their due date.
The provider reported the error to the state themselves and they’re getting in touch with those affected by phone and email, the press release stated.
Health officials said that the state temporarily paused Bloom from administering or reordering vaccines, but added that they were recently reauthorized, The Denver Post reported.
The state of Colorado is also requiring Bloom to take part in a vaccine compliance improvement plan “to ensure similar administration errors do not occur again”, the state’s health department said.
Most of the vaccines used by Bloom were not affected. While vaccines past their due date could be ineffective in protecting against Covid-19, there are no negative effects.
“The only risk is that it may not offer protection from COVID-19 the way a valid dose does, and the efficacy of the doses administered cannot be confirmed,” health officials said.
Colorado’s Covid-19 hospitalization levels are stagnant, The Denver Post reported.
Last month, the state projected that the number of cases would decline as the new variants of the virus, known as BA.2 and BA.1.12.1, struggled to find more people to infect.
While that seems to have partially occurred, there has also been a spike in those infected with the BA.5 variant, associate professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health Beth Carlton told the paper.
“I would guess we’re stuck on this plateau because of the arrival of BA.5”, she said earlier this month.
All BA variants are connected to the Omicron variant, which wreaked havoc across the US last winter.
While the new variants don’t appear to cause more severe disease, they do seem to be more contagious, better at circumventing the immune system, or both.
