Authorities in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Thursday arrested a pharmacist suspected of "deliberately" ruining hundreds of doses of coronavirus vaccines after taking them out of the refrigerator for several nights.
The Grafton Police Department said the worker at a local medical center that is part of the Aurora Health Care company
is in custody.
Police did not identify the health worker and said he has not yet been formally charged, although he has been fired from his job.
Advocate Aurora Health Care Medical Group Director Jeff Bahr told reporters during a teleconference Thursday afternoon that the pharmacist "deliberately" removed 57 vials of Moderna's vaccine (about 570 doses) from the refrigerator during the night of December 24-25, he returned them and then left them outside again on the night of December 25, until Saturday.
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Initially, the center reported that a worker was believed to
have “accidentally” left them unrefrigerated
overnight.
Moderna's vaccine does not require ultra-cold storage, like Pfizer's, but should be kept at a standard refrigerator temperature of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius (36 to 46 Fahrenheit).
Because this vaccine is still viable for 12 hours outside of refrigeration, it was used to inoculate 57 people before discarding the rest.
Police said the discarded doses were worth between $ 8,000 and $ 11,000 in total.
In a statement Wednesday night, the medical center said the person involved confessed that he intentionally removed the
57 vials
from the location where they were kept cold.
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Police in Grafton, 20 miles north of Milwaukee, said in a statement Thursday that the department,
the FBI and the
Food and Drug Administration
were
"actively"
investigating
the case.
What happened delays the vaccination campaign in a state that has registered more than 3,170 infections and 40 deaths due to the coronavirus on Wednesday.
Moderna vials can stay at room temperature for up to 12 hours, which allowed doctors to recover some of the doses, but much of it had to be discarded.
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"We are more than disappointed that the actions of this individual
result in a delay of more than 500 people in receiving his vaccine,
" the hospital said in its statement.
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The healthcare worker's motivations for ruining vaccines are not yet known.
As of Wednesday afternoon, more than 21,000 healthcare workers had received the first of two injections at the company's centers, Aurora Health Care said in a post on Twitter.
The incident occurs when millions of doses of Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, which were approved less than a month ago, are shipped to states across the country, in one of the largest vaccination campaigns in the United States.
Health workers and residents of homes for the elderly are prioritized in this first stage.
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The distribution has already been delayed so far with respect to the planned times.
With information from the Associated Press, NPR and Washington Post