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Grafton Police (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 charges that lead to jail sentencessuch 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 the 26th when the hospital realized that they had been at room temperature and discarded them, according to the president of the Aurora medical group, Jeff Bahr.
57 doses were supplied in poor condition
Hospital employees administered 57 of those doses before realizing the problem, and have notified patients who received them that the vaccines they were given they are not harmfulBut they may be “less effective or ineffective,” Bahr told a news 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 slowness in the implementation of the vaccination campaign in the US, which began on December 14.
Until this Wednesday, less than 2.8 million people had received the first dose of the vaccinejust 14 percent of the 20 million Americans 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, like vaccines should only be stored for 30 days in 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 newspaper asked this Friday The New York Times in an editorial, in which he called an “extraordinary failure” the possibility that these vials expire before being administered.
