No takers for AstraZeneca Covid vaccine: Canada will throw away 13.6 million expired doses

About 13.6 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine will be thrown away by Canada because it couldn’t find any takers for it either at home or abroad, as reported by AP. Canada signed a contract with AstraZeneca in 2020 to get 20 million doses of its vaccine, and 2.3 million Canadians received at least one dose of it, mostly between March and June 2021.

Following concerns in the spring of 2021 about rare but potentially fatal blood clots from AstraZeneca, Canada focused on using its ample supplies of the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. In July 2021, Canada promised to donate the rest of its procured supply, about 17.7 million doses. But in a statement Tuesday, Health Canada said that despite efforts to meet that pledge, 13.6 million doses have expired and will have to be thrown out.

As reported by AP, the statement said, "Due to limited demand for the vaccine and recipient country challenges with distribution and absorption, they were not accepted.″ In all, Canada donated 8.9 million doses of the Astra Zeneca vaccine — 4.8 million doses from its main supply and 4.1 million doses that it bought from the COVAX vaccine-sharing program.

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About 85% of Canadians are considered fully vaccinated, compared with 61% of the world’s population, and just 16% of people living in the world’s poorest countries.

The British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, which has already produced a widely used coronavirus vaccine, recently carried out a phase-three trial for a treatment for people at risk of death from coronavirus, mostly on participants "at high risk of progression to severe Covid-19.

"Despite the success of vaccines, many individuals such as older adults, individuals with co-morbidities and those who are immunocompromised, remain at risk for poor outcomes from severe Covid-19," said trial lead Hugh Montgomery, professor of intensive care medicine at University College London.

(with inputs from agencies)

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