MADISON, Wisconsin – 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. The department said in a press release that he was in prison. Police have not identified the pharmacist, claiming he has not yet been formally charged.
Its motive remains unclear. Police said detectives believed he knew that the spoiled doses would be useless and the people who received them would mistakenly think they had been vaccinated, when in fact they were not.
Lawyer Aurora Health Care, director of the medical group Jeff Bahr, told reporters during a conference call on Thursday afternoon that the pharmacist deliberately removed 57 bottles containing hundreds of doses of Moderna MRNA,
refrigeration vaccine at a Grafton medical center overnight from December 24 to December 25, returned them and then 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 overnight from 25 to 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.
Bahr declined to comment on the pharmacist’s motive.