COVID-19 vaccines have been produced and distributed at breakneck speed, now millions of excess doses around the world are about to expire.

• Millions of vaccine doses around the world are expected to expire amid the ongoing pandemic.

• Vaccination efforts generate waste, but the massive deployment of the COVID-19 vaccine could be catastrophic.

• The vaccination effort was unprecedented given the scale and severity of this pandemic.

• See more stories on the Insider business page.

Millions of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine around the world will expire in the coming weeks as the coronavirus pandemic rages on.

Although vaccines have been developed, produced and distributed at unprecedented speeds, a number of factors – including vaccine reluctance and misinformation – have contributed to a number of doses failing. are not used.

Vaccine distribution programs typically produce waste, but Prashant Yadav, a health care supply chain expert at the Center for Global Development, told the Washington Post that there is “no one who consistently follows expired doses “, which makes it difficult to know how many doses are going to waste.

Although there is no official global counter for the number of expired doses on shelves, local reports have painted a picture of vaccine waste around the world.

In Israel, 80,000 doses of COVID-19 were due to expire at the end of July, according to local media. The Bulgarian government announced last month that it was looking to donate its expired vaccines, having received nearly 5 million doses but using only 1.8 million.

Hundreds of thousands of vaccines will also expire in the Netherlands, although more than half of the population has already been vaccinated there. But the Dutch government threw in doses, citing legal and logistical reasons why they cannot be donated and exported, according to The Post report.

“It’s an elitist and decadent attitude,” Dennis Mook-Kanamori, a doctor at Leiden University Medical Center, told the newspaper.

In Africa, where just over 2% of the population has received at least one dose, more than 450,000 doses have expired in early August, according to data from the World Health Organization.

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“Most of the vaccines that come in have a very short expiration date,” Richard Mihigo, immunization and vaccine development coordinator for the WHO Africa regional office, told The Post.

In the United States, millions of vaccines have been thrown amid the divide between Americans over health safety guidelines such as mask warrants and vaccine requirements. Alabama got rid of 65,000 doses of the vaccine, Iowa cut more than 81,000 and just over 110,000 injections of the vaccine were dumped in Georgia, according to local reports.

“The doses we have are not enough,” Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told The Post. “They are expiring, they spoil themselves with the power cuts, they are not delivered to the population. It is quite a disaster.”

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