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A pharmacist at a Wisconsin hospital was arrested Thursday on suspicion of sabotage more than 500 doses of the vaccine against the coronavirus by deliberately removing them from the refrigerator to spoil, law enforcement and medical authorities said.
The man, who worked as an employee at Aurora Medical Center hospital in Grafton, Wisconsin, was fired earlier this week after the establishment authorities found 57 sets of the coronavirus vaccine out of cold storage.
Although the official was not identified by the administration of the enclosure, a Daily Mail article noted that the man is named Steven Brandenburg, 46, who is being held in jail on three criminal charges: recklessly endangering security, tampering with a prescription drug, and damaging property, although police do not has officially identified him as the alleged culprit.
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Each set contains 10 doses. Nearly 60 of the doses in question were administered before hospital officials determined the drug had been left unrefrigerated. long enough for the vaccine to be ineffective. The remaining 500 doses were then discarded.
Moderna, manufacturer of the vaccine, has assured the hospital that receiving an injection of any of the doses recalled from refrigeration does not pose a safety concernapart from leaving the recipient unprotected from Covid infection, said Dr. Jeff Bahr, president of the Aurora Health Care Medical Group, which runs the hospital compound.
Neither Aurora Health nor the police offered any possible motive for the sabotage.
Those who received the ineffective doses have been notified and they must be revaccinated. The episode means that the immunization of 570 people who should have already received their first injection of the two-dose vaccine will be delayed.
At an online press conference, Bahr said there was no evidence that the pharmacist tampered with the vaccines in any way in addition to taking them out of the refrigerator, or that any other dose was altered.
Grafton police said in a statement that the pharmacist “knew that spoiled vaccines would be useless and that people who received the vaccines would think they had been vaccinated against the virus when in fact they were not. “
The incident comes amid public opinion polls showing widespread skepticism about the safety of Covid-19 vaccines, which were granted emergency use authorization by federal regulators just 11 months after the virus emerged in the states. United.
Some healthcare workers who are among those designated as the first to receive the vaccine even have expressed reluctance to take the vaccine.
When initially asked after the missing jars were discovered on December 26, the pharmacist said it was an inadvertent mistakeBut during a further review of the matter, it admitted Wednesday that it intentionally removed the vaccine from the refrigerator, hospital officials said.
The individual, a resident of Grafton in the Milwaukee suburbs, He was arrested Thursday and booked into the Ozaukee County Jail for serious crimes of recklessly endangering safety, tampering with a prescription drug and criminal damage to property, police said.
