A hospital in Kansas was left with no choice but to discard almost 600 doses of COVID-19 vaccine due to a process error.

Health officials revealed on Thursday that the Lawrence Memorial Hospital had to throw out 570 doses of Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The vaccines came from Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health on Wednesday.

Fox News reported that the vaccines are normally delivered while they are frozen. This allows them to be placed in a freezer at the hospital until they can be distributed. However, health officials revealed that they did not realize "they were already thawed." This was the revelation made in a press release by the hospital

Brian Bradfield, the associate vice president of ancillary services of LMH Health, said that when they discovered that the vaccines were delivered to the hospital in a refrigerated state, they immediately reached out to Johnson & Johnson for guidance. He said that the company advised for the doses to be discarded.

In the release, Bradfield stated that Johnson & Johnson made a request for the hospital to contact the health care company that oversees distribution. The hospital will now have to coordinate with a distributor called McKesson in order to acquire replacement doses.

Russ Johnson, LMH Health President and CEO, said that they now have a vaccination team that aims to quickly review and refine the processes of preventing waste. He also noted that the previous process failed and that their team is now working to prevent errors in the future.

Johnson stated that although the discarded doses are just a small percentage of the total number of vaccines that the country has received, they know that it is not insignificant. He also described the situation as "heart-wrenching" for the hospital, and for their Unified Command partners and Phase 2 community members.

Johnson & Johnson Vaccine Johnson & Johnson Vaccine
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine will be the fourth shot authorized by the European Union Photo: AFP / KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI

He also said that they owe it to their community, as well as to the many volunteers and staff who poured their hearts into the vaccination effort. He added that they already had an almost flawless process and they will determine where their processes failed and will fix them.

Since there were affected scheduled vaccinations because of the error, FOX 4 reported that LMH Health is working on rescheduling vaccine appointments.