“It has become clear that this was a situation involving a bad actor rather than a bad process,” says Dr. Jeff Bahr, President of the Aurora Healthcare Medical Group.
It’s unclear what any changes will make to health care systems like Advocate Aurora, but officials say both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been thoroughly documented.
State health officials told WISN any incident of wasted doses should be reported and investigated.
Still, there is a growing call for transparency about the roll-out of the vaccine itself.
“I think there is an opportunity for greater transparency. We’re looking at 50 states rolling this out together,” said US Representative Bryan Steil of Wisconsin.
Senator Tammy Baldwin of Steil and Wisconsin sent a letter to Governor Tony Evers prior to the Grafton incident, asking for more details about the state’s plan.
The FBI is also involved with Grafton.
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State health officials said they are constantly working to improve the system, in what is described as the largest public health enterprise in generations.
Neither state health officials nor the governor have openly answered questions since the incident, as formal charges are now pending.
Authorities on Thursday arrested a pharmacist in a Milwaukee suburb who is suspected of deliberately ruining hundreds of doses of coronavirus vaccine by taking it out of the fridge for two nights.
Grafton police said the former pharmacist of attorney Aurora Health was arrested on suspicion of reckless endangerment, falsifying a prescription drug and criminal property damage. Police have not identified the pharmacist and say he has not yet been formally charged.
Police said detectives think he knew the tainted doses would be useless and that people who received them would mistakenly think they were vaccinated when they were not.
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Bahr told reporters in a conference call Thursday afternoon that the pharmacist deliberately removed 57 vials containing hundreds of doses of the Moderna vaccine from the refrigerator from December 24 to December 25 at a medical center in Grafton, returned them and then left them out on the night of December 25. on Saturday. The bottles contain sufficient doses to inoculate 570 people.
A pharmacy assistant discovered the bottles outside the fridge on Saturday morning. Bahr said the pharmacist initially said he had removed the vaccine to access other items in the refrigerator and that he had not accidentally replaced it.
The Moderna vaccine has a 12-hour shelf life outside of the refrigerator, so workers used the vaccine to inoculate 57 people before throwing the rest away. Police said the disposed doses were worth between $ 8,000 and $ 11,000.
Bahr said health system officials were more suspicious of the pharmacist when they reviewed the incident. After multiple interviews, the pharmacist admitted on Wednesday that he had deliberately removed the vaccine and left it overnight from December 24 to December 25, put it back in the refrigerator at one point, and then put it back in the refrigerator overnight from December 25 to December 26 again.
Bahr said this means the doses people received on Saturday are virtually useless. Moderna has told Aurora there are no security issues, but the system is monitoring them closely, he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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