A health care worker from Milwaukee has reportedly been fired after ‘intentionally’ ruining 500 doses of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine.
The employee is said to have removed 57 vials of the vaccination from the refrigerator and failed to put them back, meaning they could no longer be administered after reaching a certain temperature.
In a statement from Advocate Aurora Health, it was initially thought that the vaccines had been ‘inadvertently removed from a pharmacy refrigerator overnight’. However, it was later revealed that the employee had ‘intentionally’ removed the vaccines from the fridge and not put them back.
‘Earlier this week, we learned that 57 vials of Moderna vaccine were removed from a pharmacy refrigerator at Aurora Medical Center – Grafton overnight, resulting in more than 500 doses of vaccine being discarded,’ the company wrote in a statement, the MailOnline reports.
‘We immediately launched an internal review and were led to believe this was caused by inadvertent human error. The individual in question today acknowledged that they intentionally removed the vaccine from refrigeration.’
It went on to say that the appropriate authorities had been informed about the incident so that it could be investigated further.
‘We continue to believe that vaccination is our way out of the pandemic. We are more than disappointed that this individual’s actions will result in a delay of more than 500 people receiving their vaccine. This was a violation of our core values, and the individual is no longer employed by us,’ the statement concluded.
The Moderna vaccine is one of just two COVID-19 vaccines that have been passed for emergency use in the United States. Both this one, and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines are required to be kept in extremely cold storage in order to be effective.
As it stands, the vaccine administration is in its very early stages in the US and is currently just being given out to frontline healthcare workers.
So far, around 2.6 million doses of the vaccines have been given out in the states, despite promises that 20 million doses would be administered before the end of 2020.
Meanwhile, in the UK, regulators have just approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which is much easier to handle and store than both the Moderna and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, making them cheaper too.
In the US, regulators have no plans to approve the Oxford vaccine until April, once there is enough data to prove to the FDA that it is effective in protecting people against the virus.
