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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 the refrigerator for two nights.
Moderna COVID vaccine should be stored in freezers and is viable for up to 12 hours after withdrawal. The anonymous pharmacist withdrew 57 vials of the vaccine containing more than 500 doses on Christmas Eve and handed them back the next morning. He left the bottles on the night of December 25. They were found the next morning by another member of staff.
The police have no grounds for vandalism so far.
Associated press:
Bahr said health system officials were more wary of the pharmacist when reviewing the incident. After multiple interviews, the pharmacist admitted on Wednesday that he had withdrawn the vaccine intentionally over the two nights, Bahr said.
This means the doses people received on Saturday are practically unnecessary, he said. Moderna told Aurora there was no safety issue, but the hospital system is closely monitoring people who received the spoiled doses, he said.
According to the Washington Examiner, authorities at Advocate Aurora Medical Center tried to make the most of the situation by administering doses quickly until the vaccine deteriorated.
As the investigation unfolded and the medical center had a better understanding of the situation, they quickly sought to administer some of the vaccines as they are usable until they thaw and cannot be administered. refrozen. Hundreds of doses were thrown away, but some were administered, although Aurora health officials expressed doubts about the effectiveness of those doses because they had been removed from their twice-cooled storage unit.
Jeff Bahr, president of the Aurora Health Care medical group, called the individual a “bad actor”.
The vandalism is drawing attention to what is emerging as an epic cluster of vaccine deployments. The governors of the Red and Blue states have been angry with Washington for not sending them the vaccine doses they were promised – sometimes hundreds of thousands less.
CBS:
More than 10 states have been informed that the number of doses of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine they expected to receive the next week has been cut, with little information on the reasons. Representatives from the states of Wyoming, Minnesota, Washington, California, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Connecticut and Kentucky said they had been informed of the cuts .
While some states did not specify the extent of the reduction, officials in Washington and Oregon said their states would receive 40 percent less doses than expected. California is getting 160,000 fewer doses than expected. For Michigan, it’s nearly 25,000.
The Trump administration says there is a misunderstanding between the federal government and the states. The numbers of reported doses they were receiving were “planning numbers”.
“Potential planning numbers had been provided in the previous months with the understanding that they were just that: the potential. States were told they would receive a final allocation ahead of official allocation figures a week before, depending on the amount of doses available from manufacturers, ”the official said.
I’m calling bull shit on this. In fact, the official vaccine distribution announcements did not say anything about “planning numbers”. The federal government was too optimistic about the number of vaccine doses available or it is possible that the companies themselves failed to estimate correctly. Either way, there is general agreement that the process is not going as well as promised.
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