“It was clear that this was a situation involving a bad actor rather than a bad process,” said Dr. Jeff Bahr, president of Aurora Healthcare Medical Group.
It is unclear whether changes in healthcare systems like Advocate Aurora will do, but officials say the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are widely documented.
State health officials told WISN any incident involving missed doses should be reported and investigated.
Still, there is a growing call for transparency in the vaccine launch itself.
“I think there is an opportunity to improve transparency. We are looking at 50 states implementing this together at the same time,” said US representative Bryan Steil of Wisconsin.
Steil and Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin sent a letter to Governor Tony Evers prior to the Grafton incident, asking for more details about the state’s plan.
In Grafton, the FBI is also involved.
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State health officials said they are continually working to improve the system, in what has been described as the largest public health enterprise in generations.
Neither state health officials nor the governor have responded publicly to questions since the incident, as formal charges are pending.
Authorities arrested a suburban pharmacist from Milwaukee on Thursday, suspected of deliberately spoiling hundreds of doses of the coronavirus vaccine by removing it from the refrigerator for two nights.
The Grafton Police Department said the former Advocate Aurora Health pharmacist was arrested on suspicion of danger, tampering with a prescription drug and criminal property damage. Police have not identified the pharmacist, claiming he has not yet been formally charged.
Police said detectives believed he knew that the spoiled doses would be useless and that the people who received them would mistakenly think they were vaccinated, when in fact they were not.
RELATED: ‘We Need More Vaccine’: Coronavirus Vaccine Progress Slows While Health Authorities Wait for More Shipments
Bahr told reporters during a conference call on Thursday afternoon that the pharmacist deliberately removed 57 vials containing hundreds of doses of the Modern vaccine from refrigeration at a Grafton medical center during the night of December 24 on December 25, and left them out again on the night of December 25 for Saturday. The vials contained sufficient doses to inoculate 570 people.
A pharmacy technician discovered the bottles out of the refrigerator on Saturday morning. Bahr said the pharmacist initially said he had removed the vaccine to access other items in the refrigerator and had inadvertently failed to replace it.
The Modern vaccine is still viable for 12 hours outside the refrigerator, so workers used the vaccine to inoculate 57 people before discarding the rest. Police said the dropped doses were worth between $ 8,000 and $ 11,000.
Bahr said health care workers were more suspicious of the pharmacist as they reviewed the incident. After several interviews, the pharmacist acknowledged on Wednesday that he deliberately removed the vaccine and left it out overnight from December 24 to December 25, returned it to the refrigerator at some point and removed it again during the night of 25 on December 26th.
Bahr said that this means that the doses that people received on Saturday are practically useless. Moderna told Aurora that there are no security concerns, but the system is monitoring it closely, he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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