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A pharmacist at a Wisconsin hospital was arrested on suspicion of sabotaging more than 500 doses of the coronavirus vaccine by deliberately removing them from the refrigerator to spoil, law enforcement and medical authorities say.
Modern vaccine against COVID-19.
Photo: AFP
The pharmacist, an employee at Aurora Medical Center in Grafton, Wisconsin, at the time 57 vials of vaccine were found outside of cold storage earlier this week, was fired but has not been publicly identified, authorities said.
Each vial contains 10 doses. Nearly 60 of the doses in question were administered before hospital officials determined the drug had been left out of refrigeration long enough for the vaccine to be ineffective. The remaining 500 doses were then discarded.
Moderna Inc, maker of the vaccine, has assured the hospital that receiving an injection of any of the withdrawn doses from the refrigerator does not represent any safety problem, apart from leaving the recipient unprotected from Covid infection, Dr. Jeff Bahr, president of Aurora Health Care Medical Group, he said.
Neither Aurora Health nor the police offered any possible motive for the sabotage.
Those who received the ineffective doses have been notified and will need to be vaccinated again. 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.
In an online press conference today, Bahr said there was no evidence that the pharmacist manipulated the vaccines in any way other than taking them out of the refrigerator, or that any other doses were altered.
Grafton police said in a statement that the pharmacist “knew that spoiled vaccines would be useless and that the 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 have even expressed reluctance to take the vaccine.
When initially asked after the missing vials were discovered on Dec. 27, the pharmacist said it was an inadvertent mistake, but during a further review of the matter admitted yesterday that he had intentionally removed the vaccine from the refrigerator, hospital officials said.
The individual, a resident of Grafton in suburban Milwaukee, was arrested and booked into the Ozaukee County Jail for the felonies of recklessly endangering safety, tampering with a prescription drug and criminal property damage, police said.
-Reuters
