About 215 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines purchased by EU countries at the height of the pandemic in 2020, have been destroyed. Politico writes about this, UNN reports .
Details
The publication analyzed that since the approval of the first coronavirus vaccines at the end of 2020, EU countries have received 1.5 billion doses, of which at least 215 million doses purchased by EU countries at the height of the pandemic were later destroyed. The estimated value of the destroyed vaccines is €4 billion.
Calculations are based on figures from 19 European countries. For example, Germany provided the the publication data on vaccine disposal in June, where at that time 120 million vaccines were 120 million more vaccines were stored in warehouses. Since then, manufacturers have also introduced new versions of vaccines that are adapted to the latest coronavirus variants, making old vaccines obsolete, so they will likely be thrown away.
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Politico estimated the cost of vaccines based on their publicly available prices. For countries that reported only the total number of vaccines destroyed, without a breakdown by vaccine type, the average price was a weighted average price of 19.39 euros was used.
Many of the vaccines in question were purchased at the peak of the pandemic in 2021, when the EU, US and UK were trying to secure a limited number of doses. It was at that time that the EU signed the largest contract to purchase 1.1 billion doses from Pfizer and BioNTech.
Recall
In Ukraine, 4,000 people are hospitalized with coronavirus every week. people every week, with the peak of the disease in mid-December.