Nurse suspected of giving thousands in Germany saline solution instead of COVID-19 vaccine

Berlin — A nurse in Germany may have given more than 8,500 people saline solution instead of COVID-19 vaccine doses at a town's vaccination center earlier this year, according to officials in the country's northern state of Lower Saxony. All those affected will be informed of their newly discovered possible vulnerability to the coronavirus immediately and offered new vaccine shots.

At the end of April, a former Red Cross employee who worked at a vaccination center in the town of Schortens admitted to a colleague that she had filled six syringes with saline instead of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, police said. According to statements by the center's operators, the unidentified nurse said she dropped a vial containing the vaccine while preparing the syringes and she tried to cover it up. The nurse was immediately fired. Following the incident, authorities conducted antibody tests on more than 100 people who visited the vaccination center that day. They were also invited to receive a follow-up inoculation because it was no longer possible to trace to whom the six syringes had been administered.