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3 sent on leave in suspected vaccine sabotage

Published:Friday | January 7, 2022 | 12:11 AMTanesha Mundle/Staff Reporter
A staffer organises packets of COVID-19 vaccines at the National Health Fund cold-storage facility on Marcus Garvey Drive in Kingston on July 30, 2021. Three employees have been sent on leave in relation to a suspected case of sabotage.
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A staffer organises packets of COVID-19 vaccines at the National Health Fund cold-storage facility on Marcus Garvey Drive in Kingston on July 30, 2021. Three employees have been sent on leave in relation to a suspected case of sabotage.

Three senior personnel in charge of a National Health Fund (NHF) warehouse cold room that is suspected to have been sabotaged have been sent on leave while the police conduct a probe into the incident that affected more than 900,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses.

Contacted on Thursday, NHF Deputy Chairman Shane Dalling disclosed that the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has since given clearance for most of the inventory.

However, he said the NHF is awaiting further word from PAHO on the efficacy of more than 30,000 doses of Sinopharm and over 360,000 AstraZeneca. Dalling said that all of the vaccines are insured.

The NHF, in a statement issued Thursday, said its management board wrote to the Jamaica Constabulary Force on January 3 requesting an investigation into the circumstances leading to the breakdown in the operation of one of its cold rooms at the NHF pharmaceutical warehouse in Kingston.

The incident, which occurred on December 24 last year and affected thousands of doses, has resulted in the suspension of the NHF’s distribution of vaccines that were stored in the affected cold room.

“A wire was found cut that leads to the cooling facility, and the cooling facility was serviced 24 hours before, and although there were alerts that the system had gone down, the person or persons who got the alert did nothing,” Dalling told The Gleaner.

In the meantime, the NHF said the Ministry of Health and Wellness was briefed on the incident and is being provided with updated reports.

The NHF board has also requested the professional services of auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct an independent investigation into whether management followed standard operating procedure for temperature monitoring of cold rooms at the warehouse upon being alerted to the temperature irregularity.

Since the incident, the NHF said it has rectified the problem and the cold room is fully operational.

Additional measures have also been instituted to minimise chances of recurrence and to reduce the risks associated with the warehousing of pharmaceuticals requiring cold storage.