A pharmacist in the small town of Grafton, Wisconsin, was arrested and accused of deliberately spoiling hundreds of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine by removing it from the refrigerator for two nights.
The Moderna COVID vaccine must be stored in freezers and is viable within 12 hours of removal. The anonymous pharmacist removed 57 vials of the vaccine containing more than 500 doses on Christmas Eve and put them back the next morning. He left the bottles on the night of December 25. They were found the next morning by another employee.
The police have no reason so far for vandalism.
Associated Press:
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 intentionally removed the vaccine during the two nights, Bahr said.
This means that the doses that people received on Saturday are virtually useless, he said. Moderna told Aurora that there are no safety concerns, but the hospital’s system is closely monitoring people who have received the damaged doses, he said.
According to the Washington Examiner, Advocate Aurora Medical Center officials tried to make the best of the situation by administering doses quickly until the vaccine broke down.
As the investigation progressed and the medical center understood the situation better, they quickly sought to administer some of the vaccines because they can be used until thaw and cannot be frozen again. Hundreds of doses were dropped, but some were administered, although Aurora health officials raised doubts about the effectiveness of these doses, because they were removed from their cold storage unit twice.
Jeff Bahr, president of the Aurora Health Care Medical Group, called the individual a “bad actor”.
Vandalism calls attention to what is becoming an epic vaccine launch cluster. The governors of the red and blue states are angry with Washington for not sending the promised doses of the vaccine – sometimes hundreds of thousands less.
CBS:
More than 10 states have been informed that the number of doses of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine that they hoped to receive next week was cut, with little information about why. State officials in Wyoming, Minnesota, Washington, California, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Connecticut and Kentucky said they were notified of the reductions.
While some states have not specified the size of the reduction, officials in Washington and Oregon said their states will receive 40% less doses than expected. California is receiving 160,000 fewer doses than expected. For Michigan, it’s almost 25,000.
The Trump administration is pointing to a misunderstanding between the feds and the states. The number of doses indicates what they were receiving were “planning numbers”.
“The potential planning figures were provided in previous months with the understanding that they were just that: potential. The states were informed that they would obtain the final allocation before the official allocation numbers a week earlier, depending on the amount of doses available from manufacturers, ”said the official.
I call that bullshit. In fact, the official announcements about the vaccine’s distribution did not say anything about “number planning”. The feds were very optimistic about how many doses of vaccine would be available or it is possible that the companies themselves have not calculated correctly. Anyway, according to all reports, the process is not going as well as promised.