French.china.org.cn | Updated on 13-02-2023
Sweden has thrown away about 8.5 million doses of vaccines against the new coronavirus, local media reported on Sunday.
Discarded doses account for nearly 20% of vaccine doses Sweden has purchased, according to statistics from the Swedish Public Health Agency, Radio Sweden reported.
Richard Bergström, Sweden’s former national vaccine coordinator, told Radio Sweden the total value of the doses dropped was 1.5 billion Swedish crowns ($143 million).
The main reason the vaccine doses were discarded was that a large number of individuals did not complete their booster doses as scheduled, Bergström said.
“Most of it is made up of doses that people have chosen not to take, in other words, the third, fourth or fifth (booster) dose. They have already been purchased and now need to be destroyed,” a- he said.
As of Thursday, 88.2% of people aged 18 or over had received at least one dose, while 86.4% had received two or more doses, according to statistics from the Swedish Public Health Agency. .
Addressing the global COVID-19 vaccine disparity that had already emerged in 2021, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus denounced the fact that six times as many boosters were being administered against COVID-19 per day worldwide than primary doses in low-income countries. The countries with the highest vaccination coverage “continue to stockpile more vaccines”, while “low-income countries are still waiting” for injections (…) “a scandal that must end now”.