The Wisconsin hospital worker accused of breaking hundreds of doses of COVID-19 vaccine did not alter the vials once – he left them without refrigeration twice, his boss claims.
Steven Brandenburg, 46, is being held in prison on three criminal charges – endangering safety insecurity, adulterating a prescription drug and criminally damaging property – although police have not officially identified him as the culprit, reported the Daily Mail.
Prison files in Ozaukee County show that Brandenburg was booked on New Year’s Eve, the same day the police 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 forgery at Advocate Aurora Health Hospital in Grafton, about 20 miles north of Milwaukee.
The perpetrator left 57 ampoules at room temperature not in one night as first suspected, but two – on December 24 and 25, Dr. Jeff Bahr told reporters on Thursday in a Zoom briefing.
The culprit put the bottles on ice after the first night, then returned to shoot the same trick a second night, Bahr told reporters.
A pharmacy technician found the bottles on the counter on the morning of December 26 and put them back in the refrigerator. Later that day, 57 people were vaccinated at Aurora Grafton Medical Center because the hospital did not know the ampoules 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.
Those vaccinated have been announced, Bahr said; the hospital workers threw away the rest of the ampoules.
“There is no evidence that vaccines have harmed them other than being potentially less effective or ineffective,” he said.
The employee responsible for leaving the bottles outside told hospital officials that the move was “an unintentional mistake” made in the process of removing another medicine from the refrigerator, Bahr said.
But hospital officials have become “increasingly suspicious” of the employee after an internal review, he said. They interviewed the worker several times before finally admitting that he forged the bottles.
The employee did not explain his actions, and the police do not yet have a reason for the crimes.
Bahr assured the public that there was no evidence that the vaccine had been modified otherwise.
“This was a situation involving a bad actor, as opposed to a bad lawsuit,” he said.