The hospital worker in Wisconsin, who is accused of spoiling hundreds of doses of COVID-19 vaccine, did not tamper with the vials just once – he left them cool twice, his boss claims.
Steven Brandenburg, 46, is being held in jail on three criminal charges – recklessly endangering security, falsifying a prescribed medicine and criminal property damage – although police have not officially identified him as the alleged culprit, reports Daily Mail.
The Ozaukee County jail records show that Brandenburg was booked New Year’s Eve, the same day the police arrested the culprit, and state records show he is a licensed pharmacist.
Both the police and federal authorities – the FBI and the Food and Drug Administration – are investigating the tampering at the Aurora Health Hospital in Grafton, about 20 miles north of Milwaukee.
The offender did not leave 57 bottles at room temperature for one night as was first suspected, but two – on 24 and 25 December, Dr. Jeff Bahr told reporters Thursday in a Zoom briefing.
The culprit put the bottles back on ice after the first night and then came back again to pull the same trick a second night, Bahr told reporters.
A pharmacy technician found the bottles on a counter on the morning of December 26 and put them back in the fridge. Later that day, 57 people were vaccinated at Aurora Medical Center Grafton because the hospital did not know the vials had been left out for two nights. According to the manufacturer Moderna, the vaccine can be kept at room temperature for up to 12 hours.
Those vaccinated were notified, Bahr said; hospital workers threw out the rest of the vials.
“There is no evidence that the vaccines harm them, other than that they are less effective or ineffective,” he said.
The employee responsible for leaving the vials told hospital officials that the move was an unintentional mistake, which was done to take another medicine out of the refrigerator, Bahr said.
But hospital officials became “increasingly suspicious” of the employee after an internal investigation, he said. They questioned the worker several times before finally admitting that he had tampered with the bottles.
The employee did not explain his actions and the police still have no motive for the crimes.
Bahr assured the public that there was no evidence that the vaccine had been tampered with in any other way.
“It was a situation where a bad actor was involved as opposed to a bad process,” he said.