Almost 2,000 doses of one COVID-19 Vaccines were spoiled at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Boston after a contractor accidentally turned off a freezer, hospital officials announced on Thursday. The Jamaica Plain VA Medical Center team found on Tuesday that a freezer had broken, compromising 1,900 doses of the Modern COVID-19 vaccine.
The freezer plug was loose after a contractor accidentally disconnected it during cleaning, according to a statement from Kyle Toto, a spokesman for the VA Boston Healthcare System. The freezer was in a safe place and had an alarm system, he said.
Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines require extremely low temperatures for storage.
“For the Modern vaccine it is 12 hours. Once you are at room temperature for longer than that, you can no longer guarantee that it is effective and therefore you cannot give the vaccine,” Dr. Paul Biddinger, the Medical Director for Emergency Preparedness at Mass General Brigham, he told CBS Boston.
The system is investigating the cause of the incident and why the alarm monitoring system did not work. More doses are on the way, Toto said, and officials “do not foresee an interruption” of the system’s vaccination effort.
Temperature problems have caused problems for the launch of vaccines in other states.
Nearly 12,000 doses of Moderna that were being shipped to Michigan on Sunday were spoiled after getting too cold. In Wisconsin, a Pharmacist faces charges after authorities say he deliberately destroyed hundreds of doses, removing them from the refrigerator for two nights.
The Modern vaccine needs to be stored at normal freezing temperatures, but not in the ultra-cold required for the injection of Pfizer-BioNTech.
CBS Boston reports that Massachusetts Representative Stephen Lynch said the doses were moved to Brockton and West Roxbury while the cleanup operation is still ongoing.
“We just believe it was an accident,” Lynch told reporters on Friday. “Part of the contributing factor was the way these plugs operate. One of them is a displacement, so it is very difficult to pull out. But what was at the top of the freezer was a direct pull, so the engineering team here corrected that They created a support, took photos of that plug and sent it to all the other VA hospitals that have this thermoscientific freezer so that, if it happens elsewhere. “