Late-Night Freezer Failure Sends Hundreds Scrambling To Get A Fast-Expiring COVID-19 Vaccine

Jenny Brackett walked alongside a line of vaccine seekers that snaked out clinic doors, through a parking lot and extended across several blocks of the UW Medical Center — Northwest hospital campus in Seattle.

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"Is anyone here over the age of 65?" Brackett, an assistant administrator with UW Medicine, called out to several hundred people who were waiting past midnight on a chilly Northwest evening for a chance at receiving sought-after vaccine.

"Right here! We got one," someone yelled from the line. An older woman emerged. The crowd cheered her on. Brackett handed her a ticket allowing her access to a vaccination clinic buzzing with frantic energy.

During a chaotic vaccine rollout, this might have been one of the wildest scenes yet: After a freezer failed at a nearby medical center, nurses, firefighters and volunteers scurried throughout the hospital in a mad-dash scramble to use as many doses of Moderna COVID-19 vaccine as possible before they expired.

"I received a call this evening at 9 o'clock and learned a Kaiser freezer went down and could we help vaccinate people before the doses expired at 5:30 in the morning?" Brackett explained. Between UW Medical Center's Northwest and Montlake locations, they had 800 unexpected doses to administer.

It was not immediately clear early Friday what had caused the freezer failure.

Swedish Medical Center also received vaccine. Spokesperson Mafara Hobson said the health system received a call at 9 p.m. and posted notice on its social media pages, prompting more than 100 people to line up at Swedish's clinic in Campion Hall at Seattle University. Swedish tweeted at 11:59 p.m. that it had 588 doses to give out. By 12:30 a.m., all the clinic times had been taken.

At UW Medical Center — Northwest, word had spread on social media and in text chains like wildfire, bringing a throng of people, mostly too young and healthy to qualify in normal circumstances, to the clinic's doors. Brackett said the hospital was doing its best to vaccinate those eligible in the state's phased vaccine rollout, but that the main objective was to get it into arms and avoid waste.

No doses were wasted, according to Cassie Sauer of the Washington State Hospital Association. Sauer said she confirmed with the Washington State Department of Health that all people who received the vaccine during the scramble, regardless of age or phase, will receive a second shot from the same hospital.

One woman plucked from the crowd, Tyson Greer, 77, said she had been waking up at 1 a.m. or 3 a.m. for more than a week to search online for hard-to-secure vaccination appointments.

Now, she sat in the corner of a dingy cubicle at 1 a.m. before associate chief nursing officer Keri Nasenbeny, awaiting vaccination.

"Heaven," Greer said.

Nasenbeny inserted the needle.

"All done! Shot one," Nasenbeny said.

"We've been so careful," Greer said with relief, as she shuffled off to be observed for 15 minutes in case of side effects.

Nasenbeny said many of the staffers working the vaccination clinic had been at work since 7 a.m.

When she received word that there was fast-expiring vaccine available, she called about eight nurses, who in turn rustled up pharmacists and other volunteers. From Nasenbeny's perspective, a Seattle firefighter had seemingly appeared out of thin air to help. A hospital staffer's boyfriend was helping manage the queue.

"Everyone was just like, 'Yes,'" when asked to help, Nasenbeny said.

Meantime, streams of appreciative and newly vaccinated people walked out of the clinic and into the night with a lighter step.

"I'm fortunate," said Sarah Leyden, 57, who got word of the impromptu clinic from her wife, a hairdresser, who had learned of it through a client who is a nurse. "I just got lucky."

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