Photo/Illutration A pharmacist prepares a syringe with Pfizer’s vaccine at a COVID-19 vaccination site in New York on Feb. 18. (AP file photo)

About 1,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were deemed “unusable” after a special storage freezer was found broken, the health ministry said.

The doses of the vaccine developed by U.S. pharmaceutical company Pfizer Inc. and its German partner BioNTech were being stored at a health care facility that has started the inoculation process.

The Pfizer vaccine is supposed to be kept at around minus 70 degrees, but the temperature inside the broken freezer rose to 27 degrees, the ministry said.

As the result, about 1,000 doses were wasted.

An employee of the facility noticed something was wrong on the morning of March 1. After checking records, the employee confirmed the temperature inside the freezer had gradually risen since after 11 p.m. on Feb. 26.

The company that delivered the freezer will investigate the cause after replacing the broken freezer on March 2.

The health care facility has already finished the first round of inoculations of eligible medical workers.

The ministry will arrange an additional delivery of the vaccines so that facility staff can administer the second shots to the workers as scheduled.

There had been no other reports of malfunctioning freezers for the vaccine as of March 1, the ministry said.

The prime minister’s office on the evening of March 1 posted a message on its Twitter account, announcing that the central government will ship “one box of vaccines each” to all municipalities in the nation in the week of April 26. These shipments are intended to cover eligible elderly people.

If the special syringes that can deliver six doses per vial are used, one box can inoculate 585 people, who would receive two shots each.

About 36 million elderly people live in Japan, according to the central government’s estimate.

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