Millions of COVID-19 vaccines shared by rich countries went to waste. Why?
Global News
Poorer nations rejected 100 million COVID-19 vaccine doses in December alone, according to UNICEF, mainly because of their rapid expiry date.
At least 100 million COVID-19 vaccines sent to poorer nations had to be turned away last month — not because the countries didn’t want them, though, according to a UNICEF official.
Rather, richer nations delivered the vaccines too close to their expiration dates and in numbers too large for the recipient nations to store them, Etleva Kadilli, director of Supply Division at U.N. agency UNICEF, told lawmakers at the European Parliament on Thursday.
“More than 100 million have been rejected just in December alone,” Kadilli said, according to Reuters.
But public health experts and bioethicists say getting the world vaccinated is the key to avoiding the creation of new variants. So what happened with these doses, and how do we make sure it doesn’t happen again?
The doses wealthy nations delivered were close to their expiration, Kadilli told European lawmakers on Thursday, which gave poorer nations less time to get the vaccines into arms.
“If I was delivering a bottle of milk to you every day, and every day and I delivered a bottle of milk to you, you drank that bottle of milk. If one day I showed up, without any warning, with 100 bottles of milk that expired at midnight, you wouldn’t be able to drink them,” said Dr. Peter Singer, an adviser with the WHO, in an interview with Global News.
“And that’s exactly what happened here.”
Kerry Bowman has travelled to Yemen, a country with a 0.5-per cent vaccination rate, twice in the last five months. As issues of vaccine inequality become more and more glaring, he says he’s encountering more people abroad who think Canada is “not forming respectful global partnerships.”