Ammon News - At least 215 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines purchased by EU countries at the height of the pandemic have since been thrown away at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of €4 billion, an analysis by POLITICO reveals. And that's almost certainly an underestimate.

Since the first coronavirus vaccines were approved in late 2020, EU countries have collectively taken delivery of 1.5 billion doses (more than three for every person in Europe). Many of these now lie in landfills across the Continent.

Calculations based on available data show that EU countries have discarded an average of 0.7 jabs for every member of their population. Top of the scale is Estonia, which binned more than one dose per inhabitant, followed closely by Germany, which also threw away the largest raw volume of jabs.

If this average waste rate is projected across the rest of the EU, it would equal more than 312 million destroyed vaccines.

It's not easy to discover how many vaccines have been thrown out. Governments, including the EU's second-most populous country France, are reluctant to reveal the scale of the waste.

POLITICO's calculations are based on numbers from 19 European countries — 15 that supplied us with direct figures, and four where volumes were reported in local media. Some figures date from as recently as this month; the oldest come from December 2022.

The passage of time means the figures we received are conservative, with the real number of discarded vaccines likely much higher.

Germany, for example, provided its waste figures to POLITICO in June; at the time it had another 120 million vaccines sitting in storage. Vaccine-makers have also since introduced newer versions that are adapted to the latest coronavirus variants, making older jabs obsolete and more likely to be discarded.

POLITICO estimates the value of the 215 million wasted vaccines at more than €4 billion, based on vaccine prices reported in the media (they have not been made public). For countries that only reported the total number of vaccines destroyed, without breaking it down by vaccine type, POLITICO used a weighted average price of €19.39 calculated from data given by countries that provided a breakdown.


Politico