Wisconsin Pharmacist Sabotaging COVID Vaccine Doses

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Wisconsin pharmacist arrested on charges of sabotaging COVID vaccine doses
By Steve Gorman, Rebecca Spalding | JANUARY 1, 2021

(Reuters) - A Wisconsin hospital pharmacist was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of sabotaging more than 500 doses of coronavirus vaccine by deliberately removing them from refrigeration to spoil, police and medical authorities said.

The pharmacist, an employee of Aurora Medical Center in Grafton, Wisconsin, at the time that 57 vials of vaccine were found left out of cold storage earlier this week, has since been fired but has not been publicly identified, officials said.

Each vial contains 10 doses. Nearly 60 of the doses in question were administered before hospital officials determined the medication had been left unrefrigerated long enough to render the vaccine ineffective. The remaining 500-plus doses were then discarded.

Moderna Inc, maker of the vaccine, has assured the hospital that receiving an injection of any of the doses removed from refrigeration poses no safety issue, other than leaving the recipient unprotected from COVID infection, said Dr. Jeff Bahr, Aurora Health Care Medical Group president.

Neither Aurora Health nor law enforcement offered any possible motive for the sabotage.

Those who received the ineffective doses have been notified and will need to be re-vaccinated. The episode means that immunization will be delayed for 570 people who should by now have received their first shot of the two-dose vaccine.

Speaking to an online press briefing on Thursday, Bahr said there was no evidence the pharmacist tampered with the vaccines in any way besides removing them from refrigeration, or that any other doses were disturbed.

Grafton police said in a statement that the pharmacist “knew the spoiled vaccinations would be useless and that people who received the vaccinations would think they had been vaccinated against the virus when in fact they were not.”

The incident comes amid public opinion surveys showing widespread skepticism about the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, which were granted emergency-use authorization by federal regulators just 11 months after the virus emerged in the United States.

Reluctance to take the vaccine has even been expressed by some healthcare workers who are among those designated as first in line to receive them.

When initially questioned after the misplaced vials were discovered on Dec. 26, the pharmacist said it was an inadvertent error, but during further review of the matter admitted on Wednesday to intentionally removing the vaccine from refrigeration, hospital officials said.

The individual, a resident of Grafton in the Milwaukee suburbs, was arrested on Thursday and booked into the Ozaukee County jail on felony charges of recklessly endangering safety, adulterating a prescription drug and criminal damage to property, police said.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-pharmacist/wisconsin-pharmacist-arrested-on-charges-of-sabotaging-covid-vaccine-doses-idUSKBN2961YF

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https://abc7ny.com/health/prosecutor-wisconsin-pharmacist-thought-covid-vaccine-was-unsafe/9357389/

Wisconsin pharmacist out on bail, thought COVID vaccine would mutate DNA, prosecutors say

MILWAUKEE -- A Wisconsin pharmacist convinced the world was "crashing down" told police he tried to ruin hundreds of doses of coronavirus vaccine because he believed the shots would mutate people's DNA, according to court documents released Monday.

Police in Grafton, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of Milwaukee, arrested Advocate Aurora Health pharmacist Steven Brandenburg last week following an investigation into the 57 spoiled vials of the Moderna vaccine, which officials say contained enough doses to inoculate more than 500 people. Charges are pending.

"He'd formed this belief they were unsafe," Ozaukee County District Attorney Adam Gerol said during a virtual hearing. He added that Brandenburg was upset because he was in the midst of divorcing his wife, and an Aurora employee said Brandenburg had taken a gun to work twice.

A detective wrote in a probable cause statement that Brandenburg, 46, is an admitted conspiracy theorist and that he told investigators he intentionally tried to ruin the vaccine because it could hurt people by changing their DNA.

Misinformation around the COVID-19 vaccines has surged online with false claims circulating on everything from the vaccines' ingredients to its possible side effects.

One of the earliest false claims suggested that the vaccines could alter DNA. The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine as well as the Moderna vaccine rely on messenger RNA or mRNA, which is a fairly new technology used in vaccines that experts have been working on for years. MRNA vaccines help train the immune system to identify the spike protein on the surface of the coronavirus and create an immune response. Experts have said there is no truth to the claims that the vaccines can genetically modify humans.

Advocate Aurora Health Care Chief Medical Group Officer Jeff Bahr has said Brandenburg admitted that he deliberately removed the vials from refrigeration at the Grafton medical center overnight on Dec. 24 into Dec. 25, returned them, then left them out again on the night of Dec. 25 into Saturday.

A pharmacy technician discovered the vials outside the refrigerator on Dec. 26. Bahr said Brandenburg initially said he had removed the vials to access other items in the refrigerator and had inadvertently failed to put them back. The Moderna vaccine is viable for 12 hours outside refrigeration, so workers used the vaccine to inoculate 57 people before discarding the rest. Police said the discarded doses were worth between $8,000 and $11,000.

Bahr said the doses people received Dec. 26 are all but useless. But Gerol said during the hearing that the vials were actually retained and Moderna would need to test the doses to make sure they're ineffective before he can file charges.

Brandenburg's attorney, Jason Baltz, did not speak on the merits of the case during the hearing. Gerol held off on filing any charges, saying he still needs to determine whether Brandenburg actually destroyed the doses.

Judge Paul Malloy ordered Brandenburg held on a $10,000 signature bond on the condition that he surrender his firearms, not work in health care and have no contact with Aurora employees.

Brandenburg is in the process of divorcing his wife of eight years. The couple has two small children.

According to an affidavit his wife filed on Dec. 30, the same day Brandenburg was arrested in the vaccine tampering, he stopped off at her house on Dec. 6 and dropped off a water purifier and two 30-day supplies of food, telling her that the world was "crashing down" and she was in denial. He said the government was planning cyberattacks and was going to shut down the power grid.

She added that he was storing food in bulk along with guns in rental units and she no longer felt safe around him. A court commissioner on Monday found that Brandenburg's children were in imminent danger and temporarily prohibited them from staying with him.

Online court records indicate Brandenburg's divorce attorney withdrew from the case on Dec. 28.

[San]

A pharmacist? Seriously SMDH