About 100 people were turned away Saturday for having improperly signed up for a McHenry County Department of Health vaccine clinic, which was held to provide vaccines to local residents ages 65 and older and Phase 1a populations.

Vaccination appointments are scheduled through links the health department sends out to eligible residents, but some residents have been forwarding those links on to others who are not yet eligible to be vaccinated, Public Health Nursing Director Susan Karras told the McHenry County Board of Health Monday evening.

“People are forwarding the links when they shouldn’t be forwarding the links,” Karras said. “That’s 100 appointments that could have went to a 65-and-older person.”

Currently, the McHenry County health department is focusing on vaccinating senior residents and is finishing up provisions of second doses to some people in Phase 1a, which includes health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities, Karras said.

Residents that fall into Phase 1a may receive a link from the health department to sign up for a vaccination even if they already received it through the hospital they work for or the long-term care facility they live in, Karras said. It appears that some of those people then forwarded the link on to others.

“Some of the individuals when they were questioned shared that the link was shared to them by somebody that was a Phase 1a that already had their vaccine,” Karras said Monday.

While the 100 vaccine doses that ineligible residents tried to claim in Saturday’s clinic did not go to waste, it was a missed opportunity to vaccinate 100 more people in the 65-and-older population, Karras said at the Monday meeting.

Public Health Administrator Melissa Adamson said Wednesday that she could not confirm exactly what was done with those 100 doses but said the health department saved them for a later clinic or gave them out that day to other eligible people.

“Once you bring [vaccine doses] up to temperature, you have a certain number of days for both vaccines” to be used, Adamson said.

That’s 30 days for the Moderna vaccine and five days for the Pfizer vaccine that has been unfrozen but is still being stored in a refrigerator between 36 degrees and 46 degrees and where the vials have not yet been punctured with a needle, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Appointment links are sent out via email to eligible residents who have enrolled through the county’s vaccination portal. Those links cannot be deactivated after they are sent, creating a problem if they are forwarded on and used by other people, Karras said.

Residents are not asked to prove their vaccine eligibility when signing up for an appointment, but are asked for identification when entering the county’s vaccine clinics and will be turned away if ineligible, she said.

The issue of ineligible residents showing up at vaccine clinics has been happening since vaccine distribution began, Karras said.

It has also been happening across the state, according to communications between the McHenry County health department and the Illinois Department of Public Health.

On Feb. 11, the IDPH noted the problem in a meeting with the leaders of local health departments and recommended using a “voucher code” to prevent links from being shared and used by multiple people, according to documents obtained by the Northwest Herald through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Karras said Monday the county’s appointment scheduling system likely was not sophisticated enough to generate unique codes for each person.

The McHenry County health department has been using its own scheduling software, which it had before vaccine distribution began, Adamson said Wednesday. The state made a central scheduling system called EMTrack available to counties that did not have anything in place, but many counties with preexisting systems opted out, she said.

“We’re looking at how do we tighten this up,” Karras said Monday. “I don’t think we’re going to completely eliminate it, but that was a lot of people to turn away and a lot of wasted appointments.”

Karras’ team is looking at having more eligible residents on standby ahead of each clinic so that, if they do have to turn ineligible people away, they have more people ready to take their place, she said.

In Monday’s meeting, Board of Health members also discussed pursuing legal action against people who attempt to circumvent the county’s vaccine prioritization, which a representative of the McHenry County State’s Attorney’s Office said likely could be done if the health department is able to pinpoint residents who have been sharing appointment links.