The Wisconsin hospital official accused of spoiling hundreds of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine did not touch the vials just once – he left them without refrigeration twice, says his boss.
Steven Brandenburg, 46, is being held on three criminal charges – recklessly risking security, tampering with a prescription drug and criminal property damage – although the police have not officially identified him as the alleged culprit, the Daily Mail reported.
Ozaukee County prison records show that Brandenburg was charged on New Year’s Eve, the same day police officers arrested the culprit, and state records show that he is a licensed pharmacist.
Both police and federal authorities – the FBI and the Food and Drug Administration – are investigating the tampering at Advocate Aurora Health Hospital in Grafton, about 20 miles north of Milwaukee.
The offender left 57 bottles at room temperature, not one night as initially suspected, but two – on December 24 and 25, Dr. Jeff Bahr told reporters at a Zoom briefing on Thursday.
The culprit put the bottles back on ice after the first night, then went back to do the same trick on the 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 refrigerator. Later that day, 57 people were vaccinated at the Aurora Medical Center Grafton because the hospital did not know that the bottles had been left out for two nights. The vaccine, according to the manufacturer Moderna, can be kept at room temperature for up to 12 hours.
Vaccines were notified, said Bahr; hospital officials threw away the rest of the bottles.
“There is no evidence that vaccines have caused any harm to them, unless they are potentially less effective or ineffective,” he said.
The official responsible for leaving the bottles outside told hospital officials that the move was an “inadvertent mistake” made in the process of taking another medicine out of the refrigerator, Bahr said.
But hospital officials became “increasingly suspicious” of the employee after an internal review, he said. They interviewed the worker several times before he finally admitted to tampering with the bottles.
The official did not explain his actions and the police still have no reason for the crimes.
Bahr assured the public that there was no evidence that the vaccine had been tampered with in any other way.
“This was a situation involving a bad actor as opposed to a bad process,” he said.