It is a scandal revealed by the international journalistic project “#followthedoses” in which the newspaper Le Monde participates. As its name suggests in English, it is a question of following, “tracing” the doses of vaccine against Covid-19. However, it turns out that more than 240 million of them are now unusable because they are out of date.
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With a shelf life of six months, Pfizer’s vaccine was the most wasted in the world, according to this survey. However, in France, assures the general direction of Health, there are only doses of AstraZenecathe Swedish-British laboratory, which have gone to the trash can in France. It still looks like 218,000 doses, at 2 euros each, of this vaccine, a controversial time after cases of thrombosis.
Worldwide, the total is staggering, with the figure put forward at least 240 million wasted doses. And this is only a low estimate: these figures only concern rich countries, according to figures revealed by our colleagues from the Worldciting London-based health data analytics firm Airfinity.
Doses given to poor countries at the expiry limit
There is little information on poor countries, which mainly built up their vaccine stocks from donations from the North, which, precisely, reveals this survey, sent doses at the limit of expiry. The beneficiaries of the international Covax program have thus refused 100 million, in the month of December 2021 alone. Others have nevertheless reached the limit of the date of use, as in Africa, and in particular in Nigeria, to end up buried under the ground with a bulldozer. In France, this type of waste is incinerated.
On franceinfo, Pauline Londeix, of the Observatory of transparency in drug policies, thus denounced that “A third of the world’s population has not received a single dose of vaccine. When you see the waste figures, you can only be shocked. But unfortunately, we could have expected it because the rich countries wanted to monopolize the doses of vaccine, being afraid of running out, wanting to vaccinate the population quickly… They bought the doses and that led to this mess. I believe that there has been a recurring problem since the start of the Covid crisis, it is the question of inventory management, which is a fairly catastrophic constant“, she clarified, before estimating that “the Covax device is a failure“.
DIRECT – 240 million vaccines in the world destroyed because expired ➡️ “A third of the world’s population has not received any dose of vaccine. The Covax device is a failure”, reacts Pauline Londeix, of the Observatory of transparency in the drug policies. pic.twitter.com/YBPRYeXtIJ
— franceinfo (@franceinfo) March 30, 2022
In an “urgent” press release from the Ministry of Health, dated January 2022, we can thus read the recommendations of “carefully consult the expiration labels and the administration deadlines on the vial before any injection“, specifying that “following a modification of the marketing authorization”, the “shelf life of the vials” could see an extension of their expiration of three months, going up to nine months maximum.