Nearly 2000 doses a COVID-19 vaccine was spoiled at a Veterans Business Hospital in Boston after a contractor accidentally pulled a freezer off the plug, hospital officials announced Thursday. Jamaica Plain VA Medical Center staff discovered Tuesday that a freezer had failed, endangering 1,900 doses of the Modern COVID-19 vaccine.
According to a statement from Kyle Toto, a spokeswoman for VA Boston Healthcare System, the plug was found to be loose from the freezer after a contractor accidentally pulled it out. The freezer was in a safe place and had an alarm system, he said.
Both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines required extremely cold temperatures for storage.
“For the Moderna vaccine, it is 12 hours. Once it has been longer than room temperature, you can no longer ensure that it is effective and therefore you cannot give the vaccine,” said Dr. Paul Biddinger, the medical director for emergency preparedness at Massa Brigham, told CBS Boston.
The system is investigating the cause of the incident and why the alarm system did not work. More doses are on the way, Toto said, and officials “do not anticipate any disruption” of the system’s vaccination effort.
Issues against temperature have caused problems with the explosion of vaccines in other countries.
Nearly 12,000 doses of Moderna sent to Michigan on Sunday were spoiled after becoming too cold. In Wisconsin, a pharmacist facing charges after authorities said he deliberately destroyed hundreds of doses by taking them out of the fridge two nights.
The Moderna vaccine should be stored at regular freezing temperatures, but not the ultra-cold needed for Pfizer-BioNTech uptake.
CBS Boston reports Stephen Lynch, Massachusetts, said the doses had been moved to Brockton and West Roxbury while the cleanup was still ongoing.
“We simply believe it was an accident,” Lynch told reporters Friday. ‘Part of the contributing factor was the way these plugs work. One of them is a set-off, so it’s very difficult to pull off. But the one at the top of the freezer was a direct pull, so the engineering staff here fixed it. They created a bracket, they took the plug and sent it to all the other VA hospitals that have this thermo-scientific freezer so that it could happen differently in one case. ‘