EU countries destroyed €4 billion worth of unnecessary COVID-19 vaccine doses – Kommersant

EU countries have destroyed at least 215 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines purchased at the height of the pandemic but not used. According to the publication’s estimates Politicotheir value is at least €4 billion.

In total, during the pandemic, EU countries purchased 1.5 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines, which is more than three doses for every European resident. Politico journalists collected data from June to December of this year. Some of the data was collected from open sources, some had to be requested from specific countries. At the same time, only 15 countries agreed to provide data on the number of unused vaccines, while the rest either refused to provide information or simply did not respond to the publication’s request.

Among those who refused to provide data are France, Poland, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Cyprus, and Hungary. After analyzing the collected data, it turned out that the majority of the destroyed vaccines were in Germany – 83 million doses. This is logical from the point of view that Germany is the most populous country in the EU. With a significant lead from Germany comes Italy, where almost 50 million doses of vaccines were disposed of. The top 5 also included the Netherlands (16.3 million doses), Spain (13.9 million) and Romania (9.8 million). If we evaluate the number of destroyed doses in relation to the population of the country, Estonia takes 1st place, with 1.1 destroyed doses per person.

At the same time, as Politico journalists emphasize, reliable figures on the number of discarded vaccines are much higher, since many of the data collected from open sources refer to the beginning or middle of this year and since then the situation could have changed.

Alena Miklashevskaya