School aims for flu shot record

NASHVILLE, Oct. 4 (UPI) -- Tennessee's Vanderbilt University said it is aiming to set a Guinness World Record by distributing flu shots to 8,000 people within eight hours.

Dr. Melanie Swift, medical director of the occupational health clinic at Vanderbilt, said the idea for "Flulapalooza" began as an emergency drill, The (Nashville) Tennessean reported Tuesday.

"We have an agreement with Metro Public Health that in the event of a pandemic we would take care of vaccinating our own Vanderbilt community here on site," Swift said. "This is a massive undertaking and we want to test the capacity of our system and make sure we can deliver on that promise if we ever needed to. When we started looking at what it would take to do it, we realized it would be a rather massive scale and got curious about what the world record might be."

Swift said the 44 vaccinators will aim to give the shots to 8,000 faculty and students within eight hours to best the record of 6,215 shots set in San Diego last year.