General practitioners want to combat waste with Prullenbakvaccin.nl

GPs and institutions with remaining vaccines can report this to the website prullenbakvaccin.nl, which launched today. People who want to get vaccinated but haven’t had their turn yet can be helped anyway. The initiators say GPs also don’t have to ditch vaccines. By the way, this is about a very limited number of vaccines that remain when you open the bottle.

The site has a special map with which people can search for a vaccine that is available within 20 kilometers from their place of residence. The site then shows the contact details of the GP practice or institution they can go to.

The site is an initiative of doctors who cannot afford to throw away vaccines. “A week or so ago, GP Marco Blanker posted that he had to throw the vaccines in the trash,” Marlis Schegen, a surgeon at Amsterdam UMC, wrote on social media. “A lot of people indicated that they found it terrible.” Together with a general practitioner in training Bernard Lenstra and software developer Anis Saban, they created the prullenbakvaccin.nl website over the weekend.

“If I don’t have to shed any vaccines because of this, that would be great,” Lenstra told NOS. “You’ve seen terribly sick people here, and it hurts when you have to get off your vaccines.” The initiative was well received on social media. Lenstra: “I’m very happy about that. I see the positive feedback getting out of control between work hours.”

The remaining vaccines

Instructions for the remaining vaccines were established, but they were not always clear. GGDs and GP practices drew their own conclusions from this in recent months, whether or not according to the guidelines. “At least these guidelines are now clearer,” says Lenstra. “With regard to the AstraZeneca vaccine, KNMG now says that it can be given to those under the 60’s under the strict requirement of spillage and that someone consciously chooses it after obtaining appropriate information.”

This should go without saying, according to Linstra. “I think it is absurd to refuse to receive this vaccine for people in their 60s. My job specifically is to provide good information about very rare side effects. All this suspicion and confusion was not necessary.”

On the site’s first day of operation, there were only a few GP practices left on the map. “Don’t expect that there will be a lot of vaccinations in the first day at the moment,” says surgeon Shijin on her site. “But we expect a lot of general practitioners to participate very soon, because it is allowed. And then as few as possible good vaccines disappear in the trash.

The Ministry: It is not a rational idea

“This idea sounds sympathetic, but it is not a reasonable idea,” the Ministry of Health said of the initiative. “The vaccines from RIVM, they decide to distribute. It is not up to the others.” Doctors with remaining vaccines can redistribute them via RIVM’s “vaccination brokers”. “RIVM mediators follow the national strategy: the most vulnerable and the elderly first. This initiative does not do that.” The ministry also indicated that there are still a few vaccines and that there is still a scarcity.

Marco Blanker, one of the initiators, says this initiative is not intended for this group of vulnerable people. “We use leftovers, they are always there and cannot be called after the group that called the ministry. What we do does not contradict, but rather supports the ministry’s policy. In the sense that we want to prevent even one injection from being disposed of. So we will continue to do so.”