A pharmacist in the small town of Grafton, Wisconsin, has been arrested and charged with deliberately ruining hundreds of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine by removing them from refrigeration over two nights.
The Modern COVID vaccine must be stored in freezers and is viable up to 12 hours after it has been removed. The unnamed pharmacist removed 57 vials from the vaccine containing more than 500 doses on Christmas Eve and put them back on the next morning. He left the roads off on the night of December 25th. Another employee found them the next morning.
Police have so far had no reason for vandalism.
Associated press:
Bahr said health care officials suspected the pharmacist more as they reviewed the incident. After multiple interviews, the pharmacist acknowledged Wednesday that he intentionally removed the vaccine over the two nights, Bahr said.
That means the doses received on Saturday are virtually useless, he said. Moderna has told Aurora that there are no safety issues, but the hospital system is closely monitoring people who received the pampered doses, she said.
According to the Washington Examiner, authorities at Advocate Aurora Medical Center tried to make the most of the situation by quickly administering doses until the vaccine was damaged.
As the research developed and the medical center became more aware of the situation, they tried to quickly administer some of the vaccines so that they could be used until they thawed and could not be frozen. Hundreds of doses were discarded, but some were administered, although Aurora health officials raised doubts about the effectiveness of these doses because they were twice withdrawn from their refrigerated storage unit.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 being developed to become an epic clusterfark of a vaccine implementation. The rulers of the red and blue states have been angry with Washington for not sending them the doses of vaccine they had been promised, sometimes hundreds of thousands of doses less.
CBS:
It has been said in more than ten states that the number of doses of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine they expected to receive next week has shrunk, with little information on why. State officials in Wyoming, Minnesota, Washington, California, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Connecticut and Kentucky have said they have received notifications of reductions.
Although some states did not specify the size of the reduction, officials in Washington and Oregon said their states will receive 40% less doses than expected. California receives 160,000 fewer doses than expected. For Michigan, they are close to 25,000.
The Trump administration notes that there is a misunderstanding between the feds and the states. The number of doses they were said to receive were “planning numbers.”
“In previous months, possible planning numbers had been provided, understanding that they were just that: potential. States were told they would get the final allocation before the official allocation numbers a week earlier, depending on the amount of doses available from the manufacturers, ”the official said.
I call it crap. In fact, official announcements about vaccine distribution said nothing about the “planning figures.” The feds were too optimistic about how many doses of vaccine would be available or the companies themselves might not estimate correctly. Either way, by all accounts, the process is not going as well as promised.