A pharmacist in the small town of Grafton, Wisconsin has been arrested and charged with deliberately destroying hundreds of doses of COVID-19 by taking them out of the refrigerator for two nights.
Moderna COVID vaccine should be stored in freezers and is viable for up to 12 hours after disposal. The unnamed pharmacist removed 57 ampoules from the vaccine containing more than 500 doses on Christmas Eve and put them back the next morning. He left the bottles outside on the night of December 25th. They were found the next morning by another staff.
The police have no reason so far for vandalism.
Associated Press:
Bahr said health system officials became more suspicious of the pharmacist as they analyzed the incident. After several interviews, the pharmacist admitted on Wednesday that he intentionally eliminated the vaccine in the two nights, Bahr said.
That means the doses people received on Saturday are almost useless, he said. The modern told Aurora that there are no safety issues, but the hospital system closely monitors people who have received the altered doses, he said.
According to the Washington examiner, the authorities at the Aurora Medical Advocate Center tried to make the most of the situation, quickly administering doses until the vaccine broke down.
As the investigation progressed and the medical center better understood the situation, they quickly sought to administer some of the vaccines, as they are usable until thawing and cannot be frozen. Hundreds of doses were discarded, but some were administered, although Aurora health officials have questioned the effectiveness of these doses as they have been removed twice from their refrigerated storage unit.
Jeff Bahr, president of Aurora Health Care Medical Group, called the individual a “bad actor.”
Vandalism draws attention to what is developing to be an epic cluster of a vaccine launch. Governors in the red and blue states were angry with Washington for not sending them the promised doses of vaccine – sometimes hundreds of thousands of doses.
CBS:
Over 10 states it has been said that the number of doses Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine expected to receive next week was reduced, with little information about the reason. State officials in Wyoming, Minnesota, Washington, California, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Connecticut and Kentucky said they had been notified of the cuts.
While some states did not specify the size of the reduction, officials in Washington and Oregon said their states would receive 40% fewer doses than expected. California receives 160,000 fewer doses than expected. For Michigan, there are almost 25,000.
The Trump administration shows that there is a misunderstanding between federals and states. The number of doses they were told they were receiving were “planning numbers.”
“Potential planning numbers had been provided in previous months, understanding that they were just that: potential. The states were told that they would receive the final allocation before the official allocation numbers one week in advance, depending on the amount of doses available from the producers, ”the official said.
I call this bullshit nonsense. In fact, the official announcements about the distribution of vaccines said nothing about “planning numbers”. The federations were too optimistic about how many doses of the vaccine would be available or the companies themselves may not have estimated it correctly. In any case, from all points of view, the process is not going as well as promised.