Reports UK destroyed 600,000 vaccine doses provoke ‘disgust’ at wastage

Organizations have responded with “disgust” to reports that the UK has thrown away more than 600,000 doses of vaccine.

Australians struggling to get more vaccines for poorer countries have responded with “disgust” to reports that the UK has thrown away more than 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

The doses were reportedly discarded in August after their expiration date expired after the UK decided to stop offering the vaccine to young people due to the risk of more rare blood clots.

The waste, which is a huge loss for poorer countries struggling to access Covid vaccines, was exposed in data The Independent obtained through a Freedom of Information request.

End Covid For All spokesman Reverend Tim Costello told news.com.au he was “gross” when he heard the news.

“We are ultimately all equally vulnerable and interdependent, especially towards mutated tribes … which can eventually cripple us again,” he said.

“With that in mind … it really is quite immoral for 600,000 cans to be wasted.”

Experts have warned that it could take Covid-19 less than a year to mutate to the point where most vaccines become ineffective if authorities don’t act fast enough to vaccinate the whole world.

Reverend Costello believes that one of the problems is that the COVAX facility, the global initiative that aims to ensure access to vaccines for all countries, is now viewed as a charity rather than an organization for justice and justice.

He believes this is one of the reasons the 600,000 cans were wasted, as the charity model encourages the world’s poor to be viewed as “pondering.”

It becomes a case of “If we think about it, we’ll try to get it (the cans) out”.

Rev Costello said many rich countries, including Australia, had stocked up to five times the vaccine doses they needed.

“We bought them all,” he said. “In Kenya, less than 4 percent of the people are now vaccinated, in Nigeria it is less than 2 percent.”

Rev Costello also noted that Australia, like many other countries, had promised to donate millions of doses of vaccine, but the actual number of vaccinations given was often much lower.

Australia has pledged to share 60 million vaccines with its Indo-Pacific neighbors by the end of 2022. However, as of early last month, only 3.57 million vaccines had been shared.

The UK also pledged at the G7 summit in June to donate 100 million cans by the middle of next year, with only 20 million cans shipped overseas to date.

“It’s really awful to put it that way, but when they say human rights are universal … we only mean the rights of those who vote for us,” said Rev Costello.

Describing the waste of vaccine doses in the UK as an “absolute scandal”, Oxfam estimates that by the end of the year at least another 100 million doses could remain unused and could be phased out in the G7.

“There is a clear case that rich countries have to team up here,” Anna Marriott, Oxfam’s health policy manager, told The Independent.

“Their short-sighted vaccine nationalism and their free pass for big pharmaceutical giants to get as much as they want from these publicly funded vaccines is prolonging the pandemic and costing lives.”

The Department of Health told news.com.au on Sept. 16 that vaccine waste rates in Australia were between 1 and 2 percent.

Further inquiries for a more concise figure were not answered.

Vaccine companies make nearly $ 90,000 every minute

The analysis found that companies responsible for some Covid vaccines were making a combined profit of $ 65,000 ($ 89,000) per minute.

Pfizer and BioNTech, who developed the Comirnaty vaccine, and Moderna, who are responsible for Spikevax, are estimated to generate pretax profits of $ 34 billion this year.

The number was released by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition advocating wider access to Covid vaccines, the calculations of which were based on the companies’ own earnings reports.

“It is obscene that few companies are making millions in profits every single hour while only two percent of people in low-income countries have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus,” said Maaza Seyoum, of the African Alliance and People’s Vaccine Alliance Africa .

“Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have used their monopolies to prioritize the most profitable contracts with the richest governments and leave low-income countries out in the rain.”

Pfizer and BioNTech have shipped less than one percent of their total shipments to low-income countries, while Moderna has shipped just 0.2 percent, the PVA said.

Currently, around 98 percent of people in low-income countries are not fully vaccinated.

In contrast, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson provided their vaccines on a nonprofit basis, though AZ recently announced it would be charging some countries.

PVA, whose 80 members include the African Alliance, Global Justice Now, Oxfam and UNAIDS, is calling on pharmaceutical companies to immediately suspend intellectual property rights for Covid vaccines by agreeing to a proposed waiver of the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS agreement.

More than 100 nations, including the United States, support this move, but it is being blocked by rich countries like Britain and Germany.

– with AFP

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