Since the end of 2020, the European Union has purchased 1.5 billion doses of vaccines to fight the coronavirus, a deadly infection.
To date, at least 215 million doses of vaccines have been purchased by European Union countries at the height of the pandemic. thrown away which is estimated cost taxpayers 4 billion euros, POLITICO analysis shows.
Since the approval of the first coronavirus vaccines at the end of 2020, countries EU have received a total of 1.5 billion doses (more than three doses for every person in Europe). Many of these doses are now in landfills. Calculations show that EU countries have wasted an average of 0.7 doses for each member of their population.
At the top of the scale is Estonia, with more than one dose per inhabitant, followed by Germany, which has also thrown out a large volume of vaccines.
POLITICO’s calculations are based on data from 19 European countries. The actual number of discarded vaccines is likely much higher. Germany, for example, published waste data in June. At that time, there were another 120 million vaccines in stock. But since then, new versions of vaccines have been released, tailored to the latest coronavirus variants, rendering the old ones obsolete and more likely to be thrown out.
For countries that reported only the total number of vaccines destroyed, without breaking them down by type, POLITICO used a weighted average value of €19.39, calculated from data provided by states.
More Stories
Greece lifts all protective measures against Covid-19
AstraZeneca admitted that its Covid-19 vaccine… kills
Shocking report from Japanese scientists: “Cancer deaths increase sharply after mass Covid vaccination”