Thousands of COVID-19 vaccine doses are slated to expire by the end of the month, and the federal government and provinces are scrambling to get them into people's hands before they're forced to throw them away.
According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, more than 14 million doses of vaccination were languishing in the central vaccine inventory as of April 14. (PHAC). PHAC told Global News in an email on Tuesday that 429,450 doses of the Moderna vaccination will expire by the end of April. Last month, 759,948 expired Moderna pills were thrown away after their expiration date of March 21.
To reduce wastage even further, the federal agency says it has a few alternatives, including transferring doses between jurisdictions, donating vaccines, and examining any pending shelf life extensions.
Vaccine manufacturers were able to obtain better data on how long the vaccines stayed viable, therefore Health Canada altered expiration dates many times in the recent year.
Last summer, Pfizer's shelf life was extended from six to nine months, and Moderna's was extended from seven to nine months in December. "If the doses' shelf life cannot be prolonged, they will be disposed of correctly," according to PHAC. Although provinces claim that vaccine wastage has been limited thus far, experts are concerned that not enough is being done to get the available doses into Canadian arms due to a slower uptake of booster shots during the sixth wave.
"We're letting them expire without even trying to bring them ahead, and we're not being upfront about it," Kerry Bowman, a bioethics and global health professor at the University of Toronto, said.
"We need to make a clear judgment about what we need right now," he told Global News. "We also need a management plan, which we haven't seen."
Donations are one way to manage the supply that isn't being used by Canadians.
-Jake Moore
https://globalnews.ca/news/8773034/canada-covid-vaccine-wastage-expired-doses/
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