Steven Brandenburg shown in booking photo provided by the Ozaukee County Sheriff's Office. Photo / AP
Steven Brandenburg shown in booking photo provided by the Ozaukee County Sheriff's Office. Photo / AP
A US 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, Wisconsin, 32km north of Milwaukee, arrested Advocate Aurora Health pharmacist Steven Brandenburg last week after an investigation into 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 and his wife are divorcing, and an Aurora employee said Brandenburg had taken a gun to work twice.
A detective said Brandenburg, 46, is an admitted conspiracy theorist and told investigators he 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.
Steven Brandenburg shown in booking photo provided by the Ozaukee County Sheriff's Office. Photo / AP
Advocate Aurora Health Care chief medical group officer Jeff Bahr has said Brandenburg admitted removing the vials from refrigeration at the Grafton medical centre overnight on December 24 into December 25, returned them, then left them out again on the night of December 25 into Saturday.
A pharmacy technician found the vials outside the refrigerator on December 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 without refrigeration, so workers used the vaccine to inoculate 57 people before discarding the rest.
The Aurora Medical Centre. Photo / AP
Bahr said the doses people received December 26 are all but useless. But Gerol said during the hearing that the vials were kept and Moderna would need to test the doses to make sure they're ineffective before he can file charges.
Gerol held off on filing any charges, saying he still needs to determine whether Brandenburg actually destroyed the doses.
Judge Paul Malloy ordered Brandenburg to be released on bond, surrender his firearms, not work in health care and have no contact with Aurora employees.
Brandenburg's wife of eight years filed for divorce in June. The couple have two small children.
According to an affidavit his wife filed on December 30, the day before Brandenburg was arrested in the vaccine tampering, he stopped at her house on December 6 and dropped off a water purifier and two 30-day supplies of food, telling her that the world was "crashing down". 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 December 28.
