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Almost 2000 doses of a COVID-19[female[feminineVaccines were spoiled at a Boston Veterans Affairs hospital after a contractor accidentally unplugged a freezer, hospital officials said Thursday. Jamaica Plain VA Medical Center staff discovered on Tuesday that a freezer had failed, compromising 1,900 doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.
The freezer plug was found to be loose after a contractor accidentally unplugged it during clean-up, according to a statement from Kyle Toto, a spokesperson for VA Boston Healthcare System. The freezer was in a safe place and had an alarm system, he said.
Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines require extremely cold temperatures for storage.
“For the Moderna vaccine, it’s 12 hours. Once it has been at room temperature for longer than that, you can no longer guarantee its effectiveness and therefore you cannot administer the vaccine, ”Dr Paul Biddinger, medical director of civil protection at Mass General Brigham , told CBS Boston.
The system is investigating the cause of the incident and why the surveillance alarm system did not operate. More doses are on the way, Toto said, and officials “do not foresee any disruption” to the system’s vaccination effort.
Temperature issues have caused problems for vaccine deployments in other states.
Nearly 12,000 doses of Moderna shipped to Michigan on Sunday were spoiled after it got too cold. In Wisconsin, a pharmacist faces charges after authorities said he deliberately ruined hundreds of doses by removing them from the refrigerator for two nights.
Moderna vaccine should be stored at regular freezing temperatures, but not in the ultra-cold required for injection of Pfizer-BioNTech.
CBS Boston reports that Massachusetts Representative Stephen Lynch said doses had been moved to Brockton and West Roxbury while the cleanup operation was still ongoing.
“We just think it was an accident,” Lynch told reporters on Friday. “Part of the contributing factor was the way these plugs work. One of them is an offset, so it is very difficult to remove it. But the one at the top of the freezer was direct pull, so the engineering staff here fixed that. They created a holder, they took pictures of this plug and sent it to all the other VA hospitals that have this thermo-scientific freezer so that in case it could happen elsewhere. “
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