MD Giving Vaccine

Probably has something to do with the short shelf life the vaccine has--as least the Moderna and Pfizer versions. IIRC, they require subzero temps for transport, and once it's taken out for use, it can't be re-frozen or whatever.

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why you cannot get Covid vaccine from MD office. Do not want the vaccine just raises more questions for me that no MD office will administer the shot.

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DOCTORS HAVE TAKEN AN OATH NOT TO ADMINISTER LETHAL INJECTIONS

My Doctor and his staff do it every Wednesday.

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Can someone give me the answer as to why you cannot get Covid vaccine from MD office

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I’m an independent office not associated with a hospital or larger group. When the vaccine first rolled out, it was released to hospitals and public health centers for a few reasons. One was storage, the other was manpower.

I believe this is true of both Pfizer and moderna. This is from memory, so exact details could be called by anyone who is more recently read-up on the process, but the vials required reconstitution, and once they were reconstituted they had an 8 hour window of time before they had to be discarded. The vials contained enough solution for 5 or 6 vaccines (yes- sometimes they got 5, sometimes they got 6. This was common among several systems from what I have been told in meetings about it. Now, what the efficacy of 5 vs 6-dose vials were would be a fun story to learn about. But we still haven’t seen enough vaccinated individuals get symptoms severe enough to test to warrant concern. Looks like it is probably eventually going to be coming, but it hasn’t made it my way just yet).
So you needed the ability to have 5-6 person “groups” scheduled and showing up on a regular basis with someone to administer the shot, upload the data to LINKS, monitor for symptoms, etc.


My office, and pretty much any independent office does not have the resources to schedule people in groups, ensure they show up, have a backup for if they don’t, and a nurse to dole out vaccine (as doing it in bundles like this would almost take a full-time nurse to do anything more than about 2 vials).

Because of this, it is much better suited for hospitals who have much bigger budgets + COVID funds and the ability to pull/move nurses, particularly the capable/licensed nurses in administrative roles, over to an empty space already owned by them to deliver much bigger volumes with much less waste. Wasting even a dose early on was a huge deal and heavily frowned upon, and the hospital I had privileges at and sat on some committees about this matter did an excellent job.

Meanwhile, my clinic the last few weeks has been November-January busy in terms of volume. Even with a very sharp uptick in prevalence of COVID in my area and hospital, I wouldn’t want to read through the documentation required to participate in an EUA effort when it’s being done better by the hospital and the big chains.

Vaccines are not and have never been a big money-generator for my office. I do think this one is important, and it would be important enough for me to break even or slightly lose on from a public health perspective. But the logistics of the multi-dose vials make it unwieldy, and I couldn’t compete if I wanted to, short of shutting my office down to JUST give this. And based on my population, where most of my high-risk patients have already been vaccinated, I don’t have a huge need for another site in town, so I have the talk with patients and get them to one of the handful of places in town that offer it.


This is true of some other vaccines, too. We don’t give the one for shingles, and the PPSV-23 also gets a script to CVS/Walgreens due to how expensive they are and how much eating the cost of the vaccine (they can cost me $200-300 with a reimbursement basically covering the cost + a $10-20 “administration” fee), so a dose that isn’t given or expires can ruin the profit of an entire case, and I can admit that the pharmacies do a better job of stock vs need. So it isn’t ENTIRELY unique to the COVID vaccines , and it isn’t purely tied to finances either.



ETA- above suggests you can get it at some MD offices. My experience isn’t meant to represent all independent offices but just to give an idea of what some may think of it. There are both individual and system-owned offices that give it. We didn’t participate as above.