Steven Brandenburg, the Wisconsin pharmacist who admitted to removing some 570 doses of the Moderna vaccine from cold storage last month, has been charged with attempted criminal damage to property.
It takes time after vaccination for immunity to the virus to build up, and no vaccine is 100% effective. Plus, scientists don't yet know if the vaccine stops viral spread. Here's what's known so far.
"Now we are working at full speed to approve it & make it available in the EU," said EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. It would be the second vaccine to get EU authorization.
The crisis starts around 2 a.m. at a hospital in Mendocino County, Calif. A compressor gives out, giving the staff two hours to use the coronavirus vaccines before they are declared unusable.
"He'd formed this belief they were unsafe," prosecutors said Monday. They also disclosed that colleagues of the now-fired pharmacist, Steven Brandenburg, reported he had twice taken a gun to work.
The now-fired hospital employee later said he knew "that people who received the vaccinations would think they had been vaccinated against the virus when in fact they were not," investigators said.
Officials at the Wisconsin medical center first suspected a now-former employee inadvertently left the Moderna drugs out of cold storage. But an investigation concludes they were deliberately removed.
D.C.'s mayor urged the federal government to send more medicine to no avail. Now the states are sharing their supply to vaccinate health care workers who work in the capital but live elsewhere.
