The Spanish government reported this Monday that since vaccination against Covid began, it had to discard more than 6 million
expired
vaccines
.
It is not the first country to publish the data: it reveals how many of the purchased doses have been wasted.
In Argentina it is not easy to know this information.
Little has been said about expired vaccines in the country.
An opportunity occurred in mid-2022, when ANMAT decided to postpone the expiration of
AstraZeneca
vaccines for two months, which, according to the date on the label, had expired.
The Government gave a technical explanation of why it was possible to extend the useful life of the vaccines, an argument that was endorsed by independent experts.
At that time, other expiration extensions
were also reported
, such as a batch of Sputnik V produced by the Richmond laboratory.
According to the figures of the Public Vaccination Monitor, throughout the campaign that began in December 2020 there was a stock in the provinces -distributed and not applied- of between 8 and 12 million doses.
Currently, that amount is
11,002,747 doses
.
However, talking about stock today to refer to that figure would not be correct, as
a part
had to be discarded as the deadline allowed for the application had expired.
The question is how big is that part.
The Government reported that no vaccine expired in national warehouses.
Clarín
consulted the National Ministry of Health about expired vaccines.
" No vaccine expired for
us in national stock
," they stressed.
"We distribute everything to the provinces, which are the ones that should have this data," they explained from Carla Vizzotti's office.
To this they added that, even, "no vaccine
lost the cold chain
in the national stock or in distribution."
That is to say that in the first phase of the distribution, according to the official word, everything would have worked correctly.
What happen after?
The district with the largest "stock" of vaccines is the province of Buenos Aires.
It received 49.5 million doses from the Nation and applied 44 million, which gives a difference of
5.5 million
.
From Buenos Aires Health they admitted to this medium: “All the time, since the vaccines arrived, they are discarded due to expiration.
Both those of Covid and other vaccines ”.
However, they said that they did not have a record of how many there were in total, because they report through resolutions on each item that is
no longer usable
.
So they could not provide data on the total doses discarded to date.
In Nation they confirmed: "Vaccines are discarded in the jurisdictions and their final disposal is the responsibility of the jurisdiction."
But they were also unable to report on the
national volume
of discarded vaccines.
A Buenos Aires Health employee keeps boxes with doses of Sinopharm vaccines.
Photo: Xinhua
In June 2022, the Chief of Staff Juan Manzur gave Congress a figure on what until then would have been the supposed amount of vaccines that the country had had to discard due to expiration:
574,017
.
He attributed the data to the Department of Control of Immunopreventable Diseases, of the Ministry of Health of the Nation.
However, new official data that
Clarín
received from another province could make it necessary to review and update that figure.
This is a district that accumulated a significant stock of vaccines, part of which inevitably became waste.
"The expirations
are not due to a lack of willingness to vaccinate
, the expirations are short," they said from the Ministry of Health of Misiones, a province that received 3.2 million doses from the Nation and applied 2.2 million.
That is, a difference of a million.
In this case, the province managed quickly and transparently to report in detail how many doses they had to discard and from which laboratories.
In this district alone, whose population represents 2.78 percent of Argentina, 607,158 vaccines
have been discarded so far
.
In
2021,
they discarded 22,381 doses, of which the largest number were from AstraZeneca (13,981 doses) and the first component of Sputnik V (8,244 doses).
In
2022
, they discarded 407,305 vaccines: the most affected by waste were Moderna for adults (171,561 doses), Pfizer for adults (135,257 doses) and Sputnik V second component (65,885 doses).
"How many vaccines were discarded is not known. The data is not easily available," says Eduardo López.
Finally, so far in
2023
, 177,472 doses were discarded due to expiration, of which the vast majority (176,474 doses) were from Moderna for adults.
Other provinces consulted on the subject were unable or unwilling to provide the requested information.
The infectologist Eduardo López confirmed that the national data on expired and discarded doses “is not easily available.
Nor is
the expiration time of the vaccines
known because it depends on each laboratory and even on the batches.
This monitoring is carried out by ANMAT”.
The expert added: “How many were discarded is not known, but it is possible that they are especially the first vaccines that arrived.
In addition, they could have been replaced by more effective vaccines.
What was exposed by the Ministry of Health of the Nation goes in that direction: the Argentine population does not currently have the data at hand, consolidated, of how many of the vaccines received by the State over more than 25 months
had to be discarded
.
This data would surely serve to evaluate the
efficiency of the operation
and make corrections if necessary.
Valuable statistics both in the global balance and in real-time analysis, in order to eventually redirect idle vaccine batches before they expire, within the country or to the world, with donations.
From the beginning of the vaccination campaign, a pattern was observed: provinces
almost up to date
between the stocks received and applied, and others with a
constant accumulation
of doses that, sooner or later, would foreseeably have their destruction.
Collaborated: Misiones and La Plata correspondents
PS
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