Power Outage Apr2021 Covid-19 Vaccines, CanSino, Sinopharm Sinovac, Covovax, Covax, Novavax, CanSino, Johnson Janssen, Gamaleya Sputnik V, AstraZenica Oxford, Pfizer, Moderna, Bharat Biotech

Not only do facilities need electricity
for lights and electronic health records
but also for maintaining ventilator and
refrigerators full of medications up and
running. Many sick people in their homes
also rely on power for medical things like
oxygen tanks. Whenever outages occur,
people also can’t heat or cool their homes
to make it comfortable in the midst of
extreme temperatures, something that
can be dangerous to anyone’s health.
Considering this, all hospitals are
required to keep backup generators on
site. However, outpatient and community
clinics don’t strictly follow the same
regulations, and at times, generators fail,
as well.
In Texas, rolling blackouts have already
took out at least a set of freezers full
of vials from Moderna, forcing them to
quickly administer 5000 doses to a jail,
university, and several hospitals before
they go bad. These downed freezers
were supposed to be powered by a
backup generator that, unfortunately,
didn’t end up working at all and left 8,430
doses at risk of spoiling. Fortunately,
they received advises from Moderna that
the remaining 3,000 vaccines can be
refrigerated again for later use and would
be administered to the individuals at the
health department’s existing wait list.
Last January, Rio de Janeiro also
experienced a power outage in one of the
federal hospitals in the city’s Bonsucesso
neighborhood, leaving up to 720 doses
of CoronaVac by China’s Sinovac Biotech
at inappropriate temperatures. Although
municipal health officials still analyzed
the doses if any are still usable, it is most
likely that not all of the vials were saved.
This has become a fresh setback for
Brazil’s immunization efforts.
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