(Reuters) – A pharmacist at a Wisconsin hospital was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of sabotaging more than 500 doses of the coronavirus vaccine by deliberately removing them from the refrigerator to spoil, medical and police officials said.
The pharmacist, an employee at Aurora Medical Center in Grafton, Wisconsin, by the time 57 vials of vaccine were found outside cold storage earlier this week, has already been fired, but has not been publicly identified, officials said.
Each bottle contains 10 doses. Almost 60 of the doses in question were administered before hospital officials determined that the drug had been left unrefrigerated long enough to render the vaccine ineffective. The remaining 500 doses were then discarded.
Moderna Inc, maker of the vaccine, assured the hospital that receiving an injection of any of the doses removed from refrigeration poses no safety problem, except leaving the recipient unprotected from COVID infection, said Dr. Jeff Bahr of Aurora Health Care Medical Group President.
Neither Aurora Health nor the police offered any possible reason for the sabotage.
Those who received ineffective doses have been notified and will need to be revaccinated. The episode means that immunization will be delayed for 570 people who should have already received their first injection of the two-dose vaccine.
At an online news conference on Thursday, Bahr said there is no evidence that the pharmacist has tampered with the vaccines other than removing them from the refrigerator, or that any other doses have been changed.
Grafton police said in a statement that the pharmacist “knew that spoiled vaccines would be useless and that people who received the vaccines would think they were vaccinated against the virus when they were not.”
The incident comes amid public opinion polls showing widespread skepticism about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, which were granted emergency use authorization by federal regulators just 11 months after the virus emerged in the United States.
The reluctance to take the vaccine was even expressed by some health professionals who are among those designated as the first in line to receive it.
When questioned initially after the lost vials were discovered on Dec. 26, the pharmacist said it was an inadvertent error, but during further examination of the matter he admitted on Wednesday the intentional removal of the vaccine from the refrigerator, hospital officials said.
The individual, a resident of Grafton in the suburbs of Milwaukee, was arrested on Thursday and fined at Ozaukee County Prison on charges of recklessly placing security, tampering with a prescription drug and criminal property damage, police said. .
Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Rebecca Spalding in New York; Edition of Daniel Wallis