(Reuters) – A Wisconsin hospital pharmacist was arrested Thursday on suspicion of sabotaging more than 500 doses of coronavirus vaccine by deliberately taking it out of the refrigerator to spoil, police and medical authorities said.
The pharmacist, an employee of Aurora Medical Center in Grafton, Wisconsin, was fired at the time but was not publicly identified, officials said.
Each vial contains 10 doses. Nearly 60 of the doses involved were administered before hospital officials determined that the medication had not been cooled long enough to render the vaccine ineffective. The remaining 500 doses were then discarded.
Moderna Inc., manufacturer of the vaccine, assured the hospital that an injection of any doses removed from the refrigeration poses no safety issue except that the recipient is unprotected against COVID infection, Drs. Jeff Bahr, medical group Aurora Health Care, said. president.
Neither Aurora Health nor law enforcement offered any possible motive for the sabotage.
Those who received the ineffective doses have been notified and need to be vaccinated. The episode means that the vaccination will be delayed for 570 people who now had to get their first intake of the two-dose vaccine.
Bahr said during an online press conference on Thursday that there was no evidence that the pharmacist had tampered with the vaccines in any way other than that they had been taken out of the fridge, or that any other doses had been disturbed.
Grafton police said in a statement that the pharmacist “knows 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.”
The incident comes amid public opinion polls showing widespread skepticism about the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, which were granted emergency use by federal regulators just 11 months after the virus originated in the United States.
The reluctance to take the vaccine has even been expressed by some health professionals who are among those designated as the first in line to receive it.
When the pharmacist was initially questioned after the bottle was discovered on December 26, the pharmacist said it was an unintentional mistake, but during a further review of the case, he admitted on Wednesday that he had deliberately taken the vaccine out of the fridge. , hospital officials said.
The person, a Grafton resident in the suburbs of Milwaukee, was arrested Thursday and booked into Ozaukee County Jail on charges of the reckless threat to safety, prescription drug abuse and property damage, police said.
Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Rebecca Spalding in New York; Edited by Daniel Wallis