A former hospital pharmacist has been arrested for allegedly tampering with and destroying 57 vials of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, rendering 570 doses unusable by intentionally removing them from a pharmacy cabinet.
Police in Grafton, Wisconsin, announced the arrest Thursday. Police were called to attorney Aurora Health Hospital after the former pharmacist admitted that the vials were left overnight knowing that the 10 doses in each vial would be effectively destroyed.
The unnamed suspect was found guilty of charges by First Degree, which recklessly endangers security, and the neglect of a prescription drug and criminal property damage. Patients received doses from the spoiled vials, which according to health officials need not cause any health problems other than being ‘useless’ vaccinations.
“The value of the spoiled doses is estimated at between $ 8,000 and $ 11,000,” a Grafton Police Department news release obtained by Newsweek state. “Grafton detectives indicate that the individual knew that the spoiled vaccines would be useless and that people who received the vaccines would think they were vaccinated against the virus, when in fact they were not.”
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The hospital initially attributed the incident, which happened on Dec. 25, to unintentional human error. According to police, the pharmacist admitted that the doses were intentionally destroyed in a written statement to Aurora Health Public Safety Officers.
“We immediately launched an internal investigation and believe it was caused by unintentional human error. The person involved admitted today that they deliberately took the vaccine out of the fridge,” Adv. Aurora Health said in a statement Wednesday.
“We continue to believe that vaccination is our way out of the pandemic,” the statement continued. “We are more than disappointed that the actions of this individual will result in a delay of more than 500 people receiving their vaccine. It was a violation of our core values and the individual is no longer employed by us.”
The distribution of the two vaccines approved for emergency use in the US, developed by Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech, is slower than initially promised. Although President Donald Trump said that by the end of 2020, 100 million doses would be available, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, only 12.4 million were distributed on the last day of the year.
Just under 2.8 million people received their first dose of vaccine nationally. Both of the approved vaccines require two doses per patient, which are given approximately one month apart. There were 159,800 doses of the vaccine distributed in Wisconsin, while 37,446 state residents had already received the first dose.