Italian Authorities: "Six Vaccine Doses Injected Due to Work Overload Mistake"

[Asia Economy Reporter Yujin Cho] Italian health authorities have stated that the COVID-19 vaccine overdose incident was a mistake caused by increased workload.

According to the local daily La Nazione and others, Tomaso Bellandi, the patient safety officer of the Tuscany regional health authority, explained on the 10th (local time), "The vaccine solution in the vial (6 doses) was injected directly without diluting it with saline solution for 6 doses."

He added, "This was a human error, and one of the causes was the heavy workload faced by medical staff in recent months since the start of the vaccination campaign."

The previous day, at a hospital in Massa, a city near Florence in central Tuscany, a nurse injected an entire vial of the Pfizer vaccine into a 23-year-old woman.

In the case of the Pfizer vaccine, 1.8cc of saline solution is added to each vial to dilute it, and then 0.3cc is divided and administered to 6 people, but this preparation process was mistakenly skipped.

Currently, the local health authorities have begun investigating the circumstances with the nurse and hospital officials, and the hospital has also started its own investigation.

La Nazione reported that this is the first case worldwide of a single administration of 6 doses of the Pfizer vaccine at once.

Outside Italy, there have been reported cases in Germany and Israel where 5 doses were administered at once.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.