For months, a refrigerator at a government facility in the Dutch university town of Leiden has housed 90 or so small white boxes that contain thousands of dollars worth of AstraZeneca vaccine doses. But most of them are emblazoned with six small numbers that will soon render them worthless: 08.2021.
"There is no one who tracks expired doses systematically," said Prashant Yadav, an expert on health-care supply chains at the Center for Global Development, a think tank. Instead, information has trickled out in news reports and little-publicized official statements. The toll for human health may be even graver. "The doses we have aren't enough," said Lawrence Gostin, global health law professor at Georgetown University. "They're expiring, they're spoiling with electrical shortages, they're not being delivered to the population. It's a whole catastrophe."
In a statement to The Washington Post, the WHO said that unlike opened-vial wastage, where multi-dose vaccine vials were opened but could not be used before expiration, unopened vial wastage, such as expiry, was "avoidable." In general, the global health body said, it is recommended to keep all vaccine wastage to below 1 percent.
Blanker posted a photograph of the discarded doses on Twitter, sparking a public debate in the Netherlands. Soon other Dutch doctors teamed up to create an app to help redistribute the doses. Even when doses do go to those in need, expiration dates can pose problems. Across Africa, most countries have tailored their rollouts around a three-to-four-month delivery window, Mihigo said. But shipping delays have forced some to contend with shorter periods.
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