Canada to discard 68% of AstraZeneca vaccines bought in 2020
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After having purchased 20M AstraZeneca vaccines, Canada discarded 13.6M since they expired while the 4.1M left have not been accepted as donations either locally or globally.
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17.7 million doses of the stock remaining
Canada signed a contract with AstraZeneca in 2020 to get 20M doses of their vaccine. Approximately 2.3 million Canadians received at least one dose, but now Canada has to throw out about 13.6M doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine as no one is accepting to take it any longer, neither at home nor globally.
Throughout the pandemic, Canada concentrated on using its considerable stocks of the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna after concerns about occasional but potentially fatal blood clots caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine surfaced in the first half of 2021.
In July of 2021, Canada had only consumed 2.3M of the 20M vaccine they bought. Since the decline in Covid cases at the time, Canada committed to donating the remaining 17.7M doses of the stock it had purchased. However, Health Canada announced on Tuesday that despite attempts to fulfill that commitment, 13.6 million doses had expired and will need to be discarded.
“Due to limited demand for the vaccine and recipient country challenges with distribution and absorption, they were not accepted,” it said.
8.9 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in total were donated by Canada; 4.8 million doses came from its primary supply and 4.1 million doses came via the Covax vaccination-sharing program.
In comparison to the world's population as a whole (61%) and the residents of the world's poorest countries (16%), around 85 percent of Canadians are thought to be completely vaccinated.
It comes as a major increase in new Covid infections is being observed in several European nations, and experts warn that since essentially all restrictions have been dropped and booster uptake is frequently poor, cases may continue to rise throughout the summer.
