Thought of the Day - December 24 2021 - What Happens to All Our Expired Vaccines?

As you know at the beginning of 2021 Canada procured more vaccine per capita than any other country in the world. Luckily we did manage to defer some surplus doses from the initial agreements into 2022. That said, Canada has now pledged to buy even more COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna for 2022 and 2023, with options to extend into 2024.

Over this past summer, delivered vaccines started to expire. As a workaround, we simply extended expiry dates ( Thought of the Day - June 15 2021 - Vaccine Wars: Winners and Losers ). For example, back at the end of May, Canada agreed to add a month to the Astrazeneca expiry, and here are the extension dates granted in the US back in August for expired Pfizer.

While this fixed things in the short term, I have still been wondering what happened to the millions of doses that have since expired.

Well, now we know. Like our electronic waste, which we supposedly recycle, much of it actually ends up in garbage dumps in other countries around the world - the same is happening with our expired vaccines. More sad is that we proudly announce we are doing this by making last-minute donation pledges. A video went viral this week of Nigeria bulldozing over a million doses of donated AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines that had expired (to be fair this batch came from Europe). The expired doses were destroyed on Wednesday in Nigeria's capital, Abuja, a week after the country said it will no longer accept donated COVID-19 vaccines with short shelf lives (a euphemism for expired). Faisal Shuaib, head of Nigeria's National Primary Health Care Development Agency, said Nigeria was put in a difficult situation by developed countries that had "procured these vaccines and hoarded them … [and] at the point they were about to expire, they offered them for donation."

Dang. So now what are we going to do with them?

Cheers

Cliff