Covid-19 Live Updates: A Worker Accused of Spoiling More Than 500 Vaccine Doses Is Arrested – The New York Times

Heres what you need to know:The Moderna vaccine can be distributed more widely because it can be stored at normal freezer temperatures.Credit...Cooper Neill for The New York Times

A pharmacist at a Wisconsin hospital has been arrested and accused of intentionally removing more than 500 doses of coronavirus vaccine from refrigeration last week, knowing that the vaccines would be rendered useless and that the people receiving them would think they were protected against the virus when they were not, the police department in Grafton, Wisconsin, said Thursday.

The hospital administered some of the doses before realizing that they had been spoiled, the hospital system said.

The pharmacist, a man whom the police did not name, was arrested on recommended charges of first degree recklessly endangering safety, adulterating a prescription drug and criminal damage to property, all felonies. He is being held in the Ozaukee County jail.

It was not clear what his motive may have been. The Grafton police department is investigating the incident along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Food and Drug Administration, the department said.

The hospital system, Advocate Aurora Health, has given evolving accounts of what happened since it first discovered on Dec. 26 that the vaccines had been removed overnight from refrigeration.

First, it said the doses had been taken out accidentally. Then on Wednesday, it said that the pharmacist had admitted to intentionally removing the vials. On Thursday, in a video call with reporters, Jeff Bahr, the president of Aurora Health Care Medical Group, said that the pharmacist had admitted to removing the vials from refrigeration on two consecutive nights Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and that the hospital had administered 57 of the doses before realizing how long they had been at room temperature.

Dr. Bahr said there was no evidence that the pharmacist had tampered with the vaccine in any way other than removing it from refrigeration, and that the pharmacist was no longer employed by the hospital system.

Dr. Bahr said that the hospital had consulted with Moderna, the pharmaceutical company that made the vaccines, and had been reassured that the spoiled vaccines would not harm the individuals who received them. But because the mRNA molecules in the vaccine quickly fall apart at room temperature, the doses were rendered less effective or ineffective, Dr. Bahr said.

He said that the 57 people who received the vaccine had been notified. He did not say what the hospital planned to do about further doses for those people, who are probably employees of the health system, though Dr. Bahr did not say so specifically.

The hospital did not believe the incident resulted from any laxness or gaps in its protocols around managing the vaccine doses, Dr. Bahr said.

Its become clear that this was a situation involving a bad actor, as opposed to a bad process, he said.

Wisconsin experienced a devastating surge of coronavirus cases in the fall, and at times was the hardest-hit state in the nation relative to its population. Transmission has since slowed a bit, but the state is still reporting about 39 new cases a day for every 100,000 people. At least 5,195 Wisconsin residents have died.

As of Tuesday, the state had received 156,875 doses of vaccines and had administered 47,157 doses, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.

The United States recorded its 20 millionth case since the start of the coronavirus pandemic on Thursday, surpassing a grim milestone just as the prospects for getting the virus under control quickly in the new year appeared to dim.

Half of those 20 million cases have been recorded just since Nov. 8, a reflection of how widespread and devastating the recent surge has been. And earlier this week, Colorado identified the first known case in the United States of a new variant of the virus that is believed to be much more contagious, and which threatens to overwhelm an already burdened health care system.

The United States now accounts for nearly a quarter of the more than 83 million coronavirus cases reported in the world, and nearly a fifth of the death toll. The country has recorded more than 340,000 coronavirus deaths. Reporting of deaths has been uneven in recent days because of the holidays, but the week from Dec. 15 to Dec. 22 was the worst week for coronavirus deaths in the United States over the course of the pandemic, with 18,971 new deaths recorded.

California has become the new epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, with the huge numbers of new cases reported there in recent days offsetting declines elsewhere, including in the Great Lakes, Great Plains and Mountain West states, where the surge began. Hospitals are stretched to the breaking point in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley.

The federal government is beginning to distribute two vaccines that clinical trials have shown to be highly effective in preventing Covid-19. But while the vaccines development in record time represents a scientific triumph, the rollout so far is proving to be yet another government failure.

It has proceeded at a snails pace, with progress falling far behind what the administration had promised. As recently as earlier this month, federal officials said their goal was for 20 million people to receive their first dose by the end of this year. But, while more than 14 million vaccine doses have been distributed, a mere 2.7 million have actually been administered, according to a C.D.C. dashboard. At the current rate, it would take years to vaccinate enough Americans to substantially curb the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the deaths mount, minute by minute, hour by hour.

In 2020, we let ~340,000 Americans die, sometimes in the thousands per day, Gregg Gonsalves, an assistant professor in epidemiology at the Yale School of Medicine, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday. And we watched. There were no protests, no daily banner headlines befitting a national tragedy on this scale. Its as if we watched 9/11 in a loop for 300+ days.

Forty-two people in Boone County, in southwestern West Virginia, who were scheduled to receive the coronavirus vaccine on Wednesday were mistakenly injected with an experimental monoclonal antibody treatment instead, the West Virginia National Guard said on Thursday.

None of the 42 recipients has developed any adverse effects so far, the Guard said in a statement. The Guard, which is leading the states vaccine distribution effort, called the error a breakdown in the process.

The experimental treatment, a cocktail of antibodies made by Regeneron, is the same one President Trump received when he was hospitalized with Covid-19 in November. It is meant to be administered in an intravenous infusion, not in a direct injection like the vaccine.

Maj. Gen. James Hoyer, the adjutant general of the West Virginia National Guard, said that the mix-up apparently happened during the delivery of a shipment of the Regeneron cocktail to a distribution hub, where the vials were placed among supplies of the Moderna vaccine. Workers at the hub then apparently included the treatment vials in a shipment of vaccine to Boone County.

General Hoyer attributed the situation to a couple of human errors, and said the Guard acted swiftly as soon as it realized what had happened. We found an issue, were fixing it and were moving forward, he said in a radio interview on Thursday.

No other shipments of the vaccine have been affected, the Guard said in a statement.

Vials for the treatment and the vaccine look somewhat similar, but are clearly labeled, as are the boxes that hold them. Both are kept in refrigeration before they are used.

The blunder came at a time when record numbers of hospitalizations across the country signaled a greater need than ever for the antibody treatments, which are scarce and expensive, though some supplies are sitting unused in refrigerators across the country.

Officials in West Virginia reported 1,109 new coronavirus cases and 20 new deaths on Thursday. There have been at least 85,334 cases and 1,338 deaths in the state since the pandemic began, according to a New York Times database.

A highly contagious coronavirus variant first identified in Britain has been discovered in Florida, health officials said on Thursday.

The Florida Department of Health announced that a man in his 20s located in Martin County was the states first identified case of the variant. The man has no history of travel, officials said in a statement on Twitter.

The Department is working with the C.D.C. on this investigation, the statement reads. We encourage all to continue practicing Covid-19 mitigation. At this time, experts anticipate little to no impact on the effectiveness of the Covid vaccine.

Other cases of the variant have been identified this week in Colorado and California, and patients in those cases also did not report traveling outside of the United States. The variant, known as B.1.1.7, has not been known to lead to more severe cases of Covid-19, but it has been found to be more transmissible than previous forms, experts have said.

This means the new variant could bring more cases as well as casualties and hospitalizations, affecting an already frail health care system that has yet to see the full ramifications of holiday gatherings and travel amid the pandemic.

Mitigation efforts that have become staples of the pandemic physical distancing, mask wearing and improved ventilation will all need to remain a priority as the modes of transmission under the new variant have not changed.

This past week Florida saw an average of 10,246 coronavirus cases per day, according to a New York Times database. During a news briefing on Wednesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis said over 175,000 residents in the state have received a vaccine.

The prosecution in the criminal case against four former Minneapolis police officers charged in the death of George Floyd, a Black man who took his last breaths under the knee of a white officer, is asking the judge to delay the trial, citing the risks of the pandemic.

The prosecution argued in a motion made public on Friday that the trial, which is scheduled to begin March 8, should be delayed for three months to allow time for more people to be vaccinated, which would reduce the risk of transmission from the trial and the street demonstrations that are expected to manifest in response to the trial.

In support of its motion, the prosecution included an affidavit from Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a member of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.s Coronavirus Advisory Board, who said, an in-person trial in March 2021 that attracts a large number of people who are indoors for prolonged periods of time with public speaking is likely to create a substantial risk of Covid-19 transmission, and could become a super-spreader event.

The prosecution cited not just the risks to the participants inside the courtroom but also to the demonstrators who are likely to gather outside. It is likely to be the subject of large public demonstrations, which may increase the risk of community spread of Covid-19, according to the motion.

The death in May of Mr. Floyd, who was held on the ground on a Minneapolis street corner under the knee of Derek Chauvin, a white officer, for more than nine minutes, sparked nationwide protests against racial injustice.

Mr. Chauvin, a 19-year-veteran of the force, is charged with second-degree murder. Three other officers are charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder. All four were fired after Mr. Floyds death.

An attorney for one of the defendants, Tou Thao, the officer who held bystanders at bay while the other officers pinned Mr. Floyd to the ground, had already filed a motion asking for more time to prepare for the trial, citing delays by the prosecution in handing over evidence during discovery.

President Emmanuel Macron of France warned on Thursday of a tough year ahead because of the coronavirus pandemic, even as he struck a note of hope and vowed that authorities would accelerate their vaccination campaign.

The first months of the year will be difficult, and, at least until the spring, the epidemic will still weigh heavily on the life of our country, Mr. Macron said in his traditional New Years Eve speech.

Tonight, we are not experiencing a December 31st like any other, Mr. Macron said. Tens of thousands of police officers were enforcing a night time curfew and ban on public gatherings around the country on Thursday evening.

The year 2020 is therefore ending the way it unfolded: with efforts and restrictions, he said as he sent out his thoughts to the over 64,000 people who have died in France because of the virus so far.

Mr. Macron spent much of his speech praising ordinary French men and women who had risen to the challenge of the pandemic. Calling them our greatest pride, he cited them by name like Marie-Corentine, a 24-year-old nurse working near Paris; Jean-Luc, a garbage collector from French Guiana; or Mauricette, the 78-year-old who was the first French person to get a Covid-19 vaccine.

All of these names, these faces, are those of your sister, of your neighbor, of your friends, of the thousands of anonymous people who, committed and united, held our country through this ordeal, he said.

Mr. Macron praised the rapid development of Covid-19 vaccines, calling it unthinkable just several months ago. But he also addressed growing criticism that French authorities who are wary of rushing the countrys many vaccination skeptics were moving too slowly to inoculate the population.

Frances first wave of vaccinations is targeted at retirement and nursing home residents only. Fewer than 200 people have been vaccinated around the country since Sunday, versus nearly 80,000 in neighboring Germany.

I will not let anyone toy with the security and the good conditions, supervised by our scientists and our doctors, under which vaccinations must unfold, he said. Neither will I let, for the wrong reasons, an unjustified slowness settle in: each French person who wants to must be able to get vaccinated.

Olivier Vran, the French health minister, had announced earlier on Thursday that health workers over 50 would be able to get vaccinated starting next week, about a month earlier than initially announced.

Battered by a wave of coronavirus infections and deaths, local jails and state prison systems around the nation have resorted to a drastic strategy to keep the virus at bay: Shutting down completely and transferring their inmates elsewhere.

From California to Missouri to Pennsylvania, state and local officials say that so many guards have fallen ill with the virus and are unable to work that abruptly closing some correctional facilities is the only way to maintain community security and prisoner safety.

Experts say the fallout is easy to predict: The jails and prisons that stay open will probably become even more crowded, unsanitary and disease-ridden, and the transfers are likely to help the virus proliferate both inside and outside the walls.

Movement of people is dangerous, said Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, a professor at the University of North Carolinas School of Medicine, who has been tracking coronavirus cases in correctional settings. I think it really is not advisable to consolidate people in spaces that we know are really risky and will lead to greater rates of Covid there.

There have been more than 480,000 confirmed coronavirus infections and at least 2,100 deaths in prisons, jails and detention centers across the nation, according to a New York Times database.

Early in the pandemic, many states tried to head off virus outbreaks by reducing their jail and prison populations, releasing some offenders early and detaining fewer people awaiting trial, but those efforts often met with resistance from politicians and the public.

More recently, staffing shortages and strains on prison medical facilities have pushed states toward more concentration and crowding, rather than less. For example:

North Carolina closed the Randolph Correctional Center in Asheboro, along with three minimum security facilities, in late November and early December, and has not ruled out more closures. It feels like were holding this together with bubble gum and packaging tape, Todd Ishee, the state commissioner of prisons, said in a recent interview.

Wisconsin has closed a cell block at its prison in Waupun and started moving its 220 inmates to other prisons, despite warnings that similar prison transfers elsewhere have sown deadly outbreaks, including at San Quentin State Prison in California. More than a quarter of Waupuns guards have been infected since the start of the pandemic, according to state data.

In Missouri, Howard and Pike Counties shut down their jails. In a terse Facebook post, the Howard County Sheriffs Office wrote: The jail is temporarily closed due to shortness of staff due to illness. All detainees are currently being housed in Cooper County.

Matt Oller, the Audrain County sheriff, said he had accepted some two dozen inmates from Pike County, and would not have agreed to do so had he not been confident that he could ensure some measure of social distancing and adequate cleaning in his jail. Its a place where theres a lot of people in one place at one time, he said. Any infectious diseases are a concern in a jail setting.

JERUSALEM Israel could well become the first country to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19, health officials said on Thursday, with nearly 10 percent of the population already having received the first of two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine by the 12th day of a national vaccination program, which began on Dec. 20.

The rapid pace and scope of the program has far outstripped the rest of the world, according to international vaccination data compiled mostly from local government sources. Israel, with a population of 9 million, is followed by the tiny Gulf nation of Bahrain, which has vaccinated some 3.4 percent of its population of 1.5 million people.

Less than 1 percent of the population of the United States has been vaccinated, and in many European countries only tiny fractions of the population have received the vaccine.

Israel has prioritized health workers and citizens in the 60-plus age group.

Israeli health professionals have attributed the success of the vaccination program to several factors, including the fact that Israels population is relatively small and young. In addition, all Israeli citizens, by law, must be registered with one of the countrys four H.M.O.s, a leftover of socialized medicine. Israels heavily digitized, community-based health system, together with its centralized government, have proved particularly adept at orchestrating the logistics of national campaigns such as this.

Its quite an astonishing story, said Prof. Ran Balicer, the chief innovation officer for Clalit, the largest of the four health funds, and the chairman of the national expert advisory team counseling the government on its coronavirus response.

As Israel heads toward another election in March, the countrys fourth in two years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also taken on the vaccination campaign as a personal mission and has taken credit for securing millions of doses of vaccine from Pfizer and Moderna.

Mr. Netanyahu has made Israels potential emergence from the health and economic crisis wrought by the pandemic a keystone of his bitter fight for political survival.

The Chinese government said on Thursday that it had given conditional approval to a homegrown coronavirus vaccine after an early analysis of clinical trial results showed that it was effective, sending a positive signal for the global rollout of Chinese vaccines. The candidate is the first one approved for general use in China.

The manufacturer, a state-controlled company called Sinopharm, said a vaccine candidate made by its Beijing Institute of Biological Products arm had an efficacy rate of 79 percent based on an interim analysis of Phase 3 clinical trials. Zeng Yixin, a deputy minister at the National Health Commission, said the vaccine would be provided to the Chinese public free, a reversal of previous official statements.

More than 60,000 people in countries like the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain had been vaccinated as part of the trials, Wu Yonglin of Sinopharm said at a media briefing organized by the government. But officials did not disclose crucial details about the vaccine, like any serious side effects that may have occurred in the trials or the demographic characteristics of the sample population key data points that scientists look for in such releases.

Mr. Wu said that detailed data would be published later in major scientific research journals.

Chen Shifei, deputy director of the State Drug Administration, said at the briefing that Sinopharm had submitted the application for conditional use on Dec. 23, and that it had been approved a week later after a comprehensive and detailed review. He added that the conditional listing meant that the vaccine would be subject to a rolling review as Sinopharm continued its Phase 3 clinical trials.

In recent months, the Chinese authorities, citing emergency use, have pressed ahead with mass vaccinations before any of the countrys vaccine candidates have received official approval, in defiance of industry norms. An official from the National Health Commission said on Thursday that in the past two weeks, more than three million doses of Chinas various vaccine candidates had been administered to key population groups within the country. Officials have said they plan to vaccinate 50 million people in China by mid-February, when hundreds of millions are expected to travel for the Lunar New Year holiday.

The Sinopharm vaccines results show that it is less effective than others approved elsewhere. Still, the results are well above the 50 percent threshold that makes a vaccine effective in the eyes of the medical establishment. As the global race to create vaccines for the disease intensifies, the Chinese companies have said their candidates which use inactivated coronaviruses have an advantage in that they are cheaper and easier to transport than those produced by companies like Moderna and Pfizer.

A video of people without masks dancing in a conga line at a Republican clubs holiday party in Queens drew swift condemnation after it was posted on social media over a week ago.

Now at least one person who attended the party has been hospitalized with the coronavirus, and the restaurants liquor license has been suspended indefinitely.

Matt Binder, a journalist, posted video of the conga line on Twitter on Dec. 21, and an outpouring of criticism from officials and the public soon followed.

The party was thrown by the Whitestone Republican Club at Il Bacco, an Italian restaurant, on Dec. 9, days before Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo closed indoor dining, and was attended by several dozen people. Most of them did not appear to be wearing masks in the video, despite weeks of official warnings about the danger of holiday gatherings as coronavirus hospitalizations soared in New York.

One of the attendees, James Trent, the board chairman of the Queens Village Republican Club, was later hospitalized after he recognized Covid-19 symptoms.

Thomas Paladino, the son and campaign strategy director for Vickie Paladino, the president of the Whitestone Republican Club and a City Council candidate, confirmed that Mr. Trent had been hospitalized with the virus.

Mr. Paladino said that Mr. Trent was doing well and was expected to be released from a hospital in Nassau County on Thursday.

As an older person who shows a positive Covid test, theyre likely going to admit you, Mr. Paladino said on Thursday.

Mr. Trent told The Queens Daily Eagle, which on Wednesday first reported his hospitalization, that he had tried to behave carefully.

I wasnt on the conga line, Mr. Trent said. I ate by myself. I dont know how I got this.

Mr. Paladino said that he had seen news reports that other partygoers had tested positive but that as far as I know there really hasnt been anybody else sickened by the virus.

I can tell you that I did not wear a mask the entire evening, I had several conversations with Jim Trent up close, and I am fine, Mr. Paladino said, noting that he had not been tested for the coronavirus since the party.

A flurry of headlines this week flooded social media, documenting a seemingly concerning case of Covid-19 in a San Diego nurse who fell ill about a week after receiving his first injection of Pfizers coronavirus vaccine.

But experts said the sickness is nothing unexpected: The protective effects of vaccines are known to take at least a couple of weeks to kick in. And getting sick before completing a two-dose vaccine regimen, they said, should not undermine the potency of Pfizers product, which blazed through late-stage clinical trials with flying colors.

Reporting that a half-vaccinated person contracted the virus is really the equivalent of saying someone went outside in the middle of a rainstorm without an umbrella and got wet, said Dr. Taison Bell, a critical care physician at the University of Virginia. Dr. Bell received his first dose of Pfizers vaccine on Dec. 15, and will be getting his second shot soon.

The California nurse, identified as Matthew W., 45, in an ABC10 News report, received his first dose of Pfizers vaccine on Dec. 18. Six days later, according to the news reports, he began to feel minor symptoms, including chills, muscle aches and fatigue. He tested positive for the virus the day after Christmas.

Framing the nurses illness as news, said Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University, implied that it was a departure from the expected and that there should have been protection about a week after the first vaccine dose. Thats not the case at all.

The timeline of the California nurses illness falls well within the window of post-vaccination vulnerability, Dr. Ranney said in an interview. Its also very likely he caught the virus right around the time he got the shot, perhaps even before. People can start experiencing the symptoms of Covid-19 between two and 14 days after encountering the coronavirus, if they ever have symptoms at all.

A similar situation appears to have recently unfolded with Mike Harmon, the Kentucky state auditor, who this week tested positive for the virus the day after receiving his first dose of an unspecified coronavirus vaccine.

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Covid-19 Live Updates: A Worker Accused of Spoiling More Than 500 Vaccine Doses Is Arrested - The New York Times