The Wisconsin hospital worker accused of damaging hundreds of doses of COVID-19 vaccine did not handle the vials just once: he left them unrefrigerated twice, according to his boss.
Steven Brandenburg, 46, is being held in prison for three offenses – recklessly endangering safety, adulterating a prescription drug and criminal damage to property – although police have not officially identified him as the suspect. guilty, the Daily Mail reported.
Ozaukee County Prison records show Brandenburg booked New Year’s Eve, the same day police arrested the culprit, and state records show he is an authorized pharmacist.
Both police and federal authorities (FBI and Food and Drug Administration) are investigating the manipulation at Aurora Hospital Advocate Health Hospital in Grafton, about 20 miles north of Milwaukee.
The offender had left 57 bottles at room temperature not one night as first suspected, but two, on Dec. 24 and 25, Dr. Jeff Bahr told reporters at a Zoom briefing on Thursday.
The culprit put the vials back on ice after the first night, and then took out the same trick again a second night, Bahr told reporters.
A pharmacy technician found the vials on a counter on the morning of Dec. 26 and put them back in the fridge. Later that day, 57 people were vaccinated at Grafton Aurora Medical Center because the hospital did not know the vials had been left out for two nights. According to the manufacturer Moderna, the vaccine can be kept at room temperature for up to 12 hours.
The vaccinated have been notified, Bahr said; hospital workers threw the rest of the vials.
“There is no evidence that vaccines cause them any harm that is not potentially less effective or ineffective,” he said.
The employee responsible for leaving out the vials 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 became “increasingly suspicious” of the employee after an internal review, he said. The worker was interviewed several times before he finally admitted to handling the vials.
The employee did not explain his actions and the police still have no grounds for the crimes.
Bahr assured the public that there was no evidence that the vaccine had been manipulated otherwise.
“It was a situation that involved a bad actor rather than a bad process,” he said.