What Happens With Leftover COVID-19 Vaccine?

Healthcare professionals administer COVID-19 vaccines every day, but once the vials are open, officials can’t put the remaining vaccine back in the refrigerator or freezer for future use.

So, what happens to any leftover vaccine?

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services broke it down for WMTV.

“Once you have opened a vial and reconstituted it, you cannot put it back in the fridge or the freezer, you have to use all of the doses in that vial,” Julie Willems Van Dijk of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services told the station. “So if you’re getting to the end of the day and you have some unused vials, with vaccine, what we have asked our vaccinators to do is to find someone who wants the vaccine and get it in their arm.”

Vaccinators aim to find someone who is eligible to receive the vaccine first, before moving on to others. Some facilities also keep waiting lists in case vaccinators have to administer leftover vaccine at the end of the day.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services is also making at-home COVID-19 test kits available to residents. People can administer tests with the help of a supervisor on Zoom, and send the sample via UPS for testing.

Test kits are available to request online.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services reported more than 528,000 positive COVID-19 cases out of more than 2.9 million tests administered as of Thursday (January 21), the latest data available as of Friday morning (January 22).

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