Kroger pharmacy gives wrong shot to customers who expected COVID vaccine in Virginia
Customers expecting to receive a COVID-19 vaccine at a Kroger pharmacy in Virginia were injected with something else, and now the grocery chain is apologizing.
Kroger isn’t saying exactly how many customers were affected, but said “a small number of individuals” were given saline shots instead of vaccine, WTVR reported.
It was an “honest mistake,” Kroger spokeswoman Allison McGee told the TV station.
In a statement to McClatchy News, Kroger said the situation “was immediately addressed ... and all vaccinators were retrained and reminded of our current vaccination policies.”
After realizing the mistake, the customers, who went to Kroger’s Little Clinic in Midlothian, were contacted, the statement said, and all have since been given the correct shots.
“We apologize for this oversight and the inconvenience caused for these customers,” it said.
One customer, Carrie Hawes, went in Monday for her vaccination, KULR reported, and the next day, she received a call explaining the mistake. Within two hours of the call, she was vaccinated with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
Hawes said she isn’t angry with Kroger, and hopes that what happened to her doesn’t discourage others from getting vaccinated themselves.
“I get that it’s been a long year, and there isn’t a lot of trust sometimes in our systems and the process, but I think everyone has the best intentions, and the end result is to get as many people as we can vaccinated as quickly as we can so we can all be protective of our community,” she said, KULR reported.
This isn’t the first time there’s been a coronavirus vaccine mix-up.
Back in December, shortly after the first vaccine shipments began arriving in the U.S., West Virginia officials reported 42 people who lined up for the Moderna vaccine were mistakenly injected with Regeneron antibody treatment, McClatchy News previously reported.
In late February, a 91-year-old Ohio man was hospitalized after being vaccinated twice in the same day, McClatchy reported. He was given two doses of Moderna’s vaccine just four hours apart, which sent him into respiratory distress, but he ultimately recovered.
