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Grafton Police in Wisconsin, USA, arrested a pharmacist on Thursday who “intentionally” thawed more than 500 doses of covid-19 vaccine, knowing that they would spoil, local media reported this Friday.
The pharmacist, who worked in a hospital, took out the refrigeration doses last week and the health center administered some of them before realizing they had gone bad, according to the hospital group, Advocate Aurora Health.
The detainee admitted this week that he had intentionally removed those doses of the pharmaceutical vaccine from the refrigerator Modern, which recommends storing your vials at a temperature of -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit).
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the local Grafton Police are investigating the case, and have not yet clarified what motivated the pharmacist to thaw so many doses of the vaccine. .
The pharmacist faces possible jail time charges, such as endangering the safety of others in the first degree, tampering with a prescription drug, and causing criminal damage to property.
The former hospital employee removed the vials from the refrigerator for two consecutive nights, those of December 24 and 25, and it was on Saturday 26 that the hospital realized that they had been at room temperature and discarded them, according to the president of the medical group Aurora, Jeff Bahr.
Hospital employees administered 57 of those doses before realizing the problem, and they have notified patients who received them that the vaccines they gave them are not harmful, but they can be “Less effective or not effective”Bahr said at a press conference.
Bahr did not clarify whether those 57 people – who according to local media are probably medical workers from the hospital itself – will receive new doses of the vaccine, and stressed that they had fired the pharmacist.
The event comes at a time when public health experts are very concerned about the slow implementation of the vaccination campaign in the US, which began on December 14.
As of Wednesday, less than 2.8 million people had received the first dose of the vaccine, just 14% of the 20 million Americans that the government planned to immunize before the end of December.
The health authorities have recognized that this balance is “disappointing”, and some experts warn that, as the vaccines should only be stored for 30 days in the portable freezers in which they are distributed, it is possible that thousands of vials expire at the end of January .
“Have we come this far to let our vaccines spoil in our freezers?”The New York Times newspaper was asked this Friday in an editorial, in which it called an “extraordinary failure” the possibility that these vials expire before being administered.
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