'It's hard to tell:' Some potentially given saline instead of COVID-19 vaccine

Marnin Heisel isn't sure whether he received a saline dose, or a Pfizer-Biontech COVID-19 vaccine when he attended a St. Thomas, Ont. clinic for his booster shot.

Marnin Heisel isn't sure whether he received a saline dose, or a Pfizer-Biontech COVID-19 vaccine when he attended a St. Thomas, Ont. clinic for his booster shot.

"I had no reaction from the shot and then had a little bit of pain in the arm," says Heisel, who attended the Southwestern Public Health (SWPH) vaccine clinic on Nov. 30, 2021 at the St. Thomas-Elgin Memorial Arena.

"If you were to ask me do I think I got the full vaccine or do I think I got saline before my arm started hurting? I might have said nothing afterwards but It's really hard to tell."

Heisel received a call on his cell phone from someone at SWPH Tuesday evening, informing him there may have been a human error when he received his third dose.

Six people out of 257 who got their shot, or two percent, were not given their vaccine that day.

"A medication error is never something that we're proud of," says Dr. Joyce Lock, the medical officer of health for SWPH.

"The manufacturer sends it to us in a slightly concentrated form and then we have to dilute it down to get to the proper strength. And so then a little bit of salt water is added. At the end of the day, we reconcile the amount of little bottles of saline with the amount of vaccine doses and of course, at the end of the day, there should be equal numbers every single day. So we did that on that particular day. And we noticed, we're out," she explains.