While Covid-19 cases are rising slightly, the Directorate General of Health (DGS) has confirmed that 218,000 doses of Astra Zeneca vaccines have been discarded since the start of the vaccine campaign in France.
The expiry date, established at six months by the Swedish-British laboratory, had passed.
Read alsoCovid-19: in France, cases are increasing but the impact on the hospital remains limited
The latter were withdrawn from the market in July 2021 following several cases of thrombosis.
Since then, deliveries of the serum have been non-existent in France.
Only the messenger RNA vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna, were part of the recall campaign, launched in early 2022. The Janssen followed the same fate as its cousin Astra Zeneca.
Does the mess stop at the French borders?
The international Covax system, responsible for distributing doses to disadvantaged countries, would not be outdone.
Indeed, the latter mostly benefit from bottles from the AstraZeneca laboratory, not only cheaper but also discarded by several European countries.
Latest example, at the end of December 2021, Nigeria incinerated more than a million AstraZeneca doses donated a few months earlier.
“
When these vaccines were offered to us, we knew that they had a short lifespan, but we lived in an environment where the supply of vaccines was very scarce
,” said the director of the national agency in charge at the time. immunization programs, Dr. Faisal Shuaib.
That's not all.
According to a survey by
Le Monde
, the waste of vaccines would be much greater.
More than 240 million doses would have passed their expiry date, only for the rich countries.
If nearly 20% of them would be doses of AstraZeneca, the first place would go to Pfizer, the most used vaccine in the West, with 168 million doses thrown away.
