A pharmacist at Wisconsin Hospital has been fired for deliberately spoiling hundreds of doses of coronavirus vaccine by taking it out of the refrigerator overnight, was arrested Thursday.
Police in Grafton, Wisc. – about 25 miles north of Milwaukee – confirmed the arrest, but did not immediately release the suspect’s name, as he has yet to be formally charged.
The suspect was arrested on the grounds of reckless threat, disregard of a prescription drug and criminal property damage.
Aurora Medical Center fired the pharmacist earlier Wednesday after admitting last week that he had deliberately removed 57 vials of the Moderna vaccine from a refrigerator in the hospital.
Each vial contains approximately 10 doses of the vaccine.
It remains unclear what motivated the man to destroy the long-awaited vaccination.
Aurora Health Care Chief Medical Officer Jeff Bahr said in a press call Thursday that the pharmacist removed the vials from the cold room overnight Dec. 24 to Dec. 25, replaced them and left them out again from Dec. 25 to Dec. 26.
When a colleague saw the bottles sitting, the pharmacist initially played them off as an accident and said he took them out of the fridge to gain access to something else and then forgot again.
Upon further questioning, the pharmacist admitted that he had intentionally removed the vaccines, hospital officials said.
With Wires