Beth Harvey, MD, FAAP – WCAAP Vaccine Committee
It started, as many workplace scandals do, with a small irregularity that no one could quite explain.
Shipment records at the clinic showed vaccines arriving on schedule — but not to the clinic. For weeks, perhaps longer, temperature-sensitive vaccines had been quietly routed to a private residential address. On this quiet shady lane lived the clinic’s mild mannered vaccine coordinator.
When investigators first pieced together the delivery trail, the picture that emerged was unsettling in its audacity. The coordinator had rerouted official pharmaceutical shipments — cold-chain products requiring strict handling protocols — to their personal residence. From there, roughly once a week, they would load the vaccine inventory into their own vehicle and transport them to the clinic in their red Honda Civic, off the books and outside any sanctioned process.
The breach was significant. Every link in that unauthorized chain — the home and transport storage conditions, the personal vehicle, the ad hoc transport schedule — represented a point of failure with potential consequences for patient safety and vaccine efficacy.
When confronted, the coordinator was asked in no uncertain terms to stop treating home deliveries of vaccines like an Amazon delivery.
But they didn’t stop. They just did a calculated pivot. The coordinator quietly updated the shipping address — not back to the clinic, but to a second place of employment. The operation simply continued under a different roof, with the coordinator once again serving as an unsanctioned courier between a secondary location and the clinic.
It took direct intervention, a structured agreement, and close scheduling coordination to finally bring the deliveries back under proper oversight and protocol, ensuring that from that point forward, a responsible party would be physically present at the clinic to receive every shipment as intended.
The investigation left one lingering question that true crime always leaves behind: was this a rogue act of misguided efficiency, or something more nefarious? In the end, what may have begun as a shortcut became a pattern. And patterns, as any investigator will tell you, are rarely accidental.
So if you don’t know where your vaccines are delivered, check it out. Make sure all of your staff are trained to know what to do with deliveries, how to store vaccines and to recognize them. We have tools that can be shared with your entire team to help. Watching when deliveries will arrive, signing up for alerts, especially near holidays is key.
https://doh.wa.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/Documents/Pubs//348-351-CreateSubmitVaccineOrder.pdf