(Reuters) – A Wisconsin hospital pharmacist was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of sabotaging more than 500 doses of coronavirus vaccine by deliberately removing them from refrigeration to spoil them, police and medical authorities said .
The pharmacist, an employee of Aurora Medical Center in Grafton, Wisconsin, at the time 57 vaccine vials were left out of the cold storage earlier this week, has been fired but has not been publicly identified, according to officials reported.
Each vial contains 10 doses. About 60 of the doses in question were administered before hospital officials determined that the medication had been left uncooled long enough to make the vaccine ineffective. The remaining doses of more than 500 were then discarded.
Moderna Inc., the vaccine maker, has assured the hospital that receiving an injection of any of the withdrawn doses from refrigeration poses no safety issue, other than leaving the recipient unprotected from COVID infection, the Dr. Jeff Bahr, Aurora Health Care Medical Group president.
Neither Aurora Health nor law enforcement offered any possible reason for the sabotage.
Those who received ineffective doses have been warned and will need to be vaccinated again. The episode means vaccination will be delayed for 570 people who should have already received the first vaccine of two vaccines.
Speaking at an online press conference on Thursday, Bahr said there was no evidence that the pharmacist handled the vaccines in any way other than removing them from refrigeration or altering other doses.
Grafton police said in a statement that the pharmacist “knew that damaged vaccinations would be useless and that people who received the vaccines would think they had been vaccinated against the virus when in fact they were not.”
The incident comes amid public opinion polls showing widespread skepticism about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, which received emergency use authorization from federal regulators just 11 months after the virus emerged in the United States.
Even some health workers who are reluctant to take the vaccine have been cast among those designated as the first to receive it.
When initially questioned after the vials were discovered out of place on Dec. 26, the pharmacist said it was an unintentional mistake, but during a new review of the matter admitted Wednesday to the intentional removal of the vaccine from the refrigeration, hospital officials said.
The individual, a resident of Grafton, on the outskirts of Milwaukee, was arrested Thursday and sent to the Ozaukee County Jail for reckless endangerment of security, adulteration of prescription drugs and criminal property damage , according to police.
Report by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Rebecca Spalding in New York; Edited by Daniel Wallis