Two Spanish nurses managed, by using a needle with greater precision and with greater dead space, to extract a seventh dose from each vial of Pfizer’s anticovid vaccine, which is currently they get six.

With the method to be carried out, “we would have less losses in that ‘liquid gold’ that is the vaccine right now,” Ana Sola Martín, a nurse at the Hospital Clínico de Valencia (western Spain) and professor at the University of Valencia, told GLM, who made this finding together with Natalia Coll, also a nurse.
As Sola Martín explains, when there was a shortage in the distribution of vaccines and when they saw that the second dose was pressing between the health and nursing staff, both did “the mathematical calculation.”
“In this case we did simulation tests with different materials, this was the process until we got it,” he explained, adding that “who does these things” is the nursing staff.
According to Sola Martín, during the process they avoided, as the Pfizer vaccine technical sheet says, “the dead spaces of needles and syringes” and saw that “it was very important, as the technical sheet indicated, that you had to spend a specific material when respect”.
This material, he points out, should have “larger calibers because if not, on that path you would lose more drops and those drops, as I say, are liquid gold which is very scarce right now.”
As he explains, the calculation that Pfizer talks about in its technical data sheet is 2.25 milliliters when the dissolution is made and the doses are 0.3 milliliters, which means that 6 doses are 1.8 milliliters, which gave ” a large remnant, 0.45 milliliters. “
“If a dose is 0.3, of course there was one more dose,” says the nurse, who points out that in the technical data sheet of the pharmaceutical company “it is not prohibited, therefore it is already an important part.”
As he explains, “if you have the same concentration, those 2.25 milliliters, you will have the same concentration in 0.3 of the first dose as in 0.3 of the last dose, the same proportion of the vaccine.”
“It is simply to make this verification, which we are already doing in situ, to publish it at a medical and scientific level,” says Ana Sola Martín, who adds that the proposal they make of the method to be carried out is to use a 25G needle, the one used in the insulin syringe.
As he indicates, “it is much smaller, has more dead space and is much more precise, therefore we would have less losses in that ‘liquid gold’ that is the vaccine right now”.
In the case of Moderna’s vaccine, of which ten doses are currently taken from each vial, he explains that nothing is introduced because it arrives already diluted and all you have to do is extract it.
“If you do it with the same method, with these more precision needles and with these syringes with a reduced dead space,” he adds, “we are verifying that with a greater number of doses the manufacturer has to leave more remnants and therefore you get an extra dose, in the case of Moderna 0.5 milliliters, not 0.3”. 

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