A nurse in Germany is accused of switching COVID-19 vaccines with saline, resulting in thousands of people needing to be vaccinated again.
The incident occurred at the Roffhausen immunization center in Friesland between March and April, CNN reported on Wednesday. Nearly 8,600 people were advised to be revaccinated as a precaution.
Authorities said the nurse, who was not identified, was able to access the vials because she was responsible for preparing the vaccines and syringes, the news outlet reported.
“The investigations of the police have shown the person was motivated to oppose the vaccination,” said Claudia Schroder, the deputy head of Germany’s Lower Saxony coronavirus team, according to CNN. “Since she remains silent with police, we do not know whether and to what extent she was manipulated during this period.”
The nurse admitted to giving six patients the fake doses in April, The Washington Post reported, citing German television channel NDR. She said she replaced those vials to cover for the fact that she dropped a vial of the Pfizer vaccine.
Those who were inoculated when the suspected switch took place were all over the age of 70, the Post reported.
Germany has administered more than 95 million vaccine doses, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Forty-six million Germans are fully vaccinated, representing 55.6 percent of the nation’s population.
In June, a Wisconsin pharmacist who purposely sabotaged hundreds of COVID-19 vaccine doses, believing them to be unsafe, was sentenced to three years in prison.