The Nigeria government has announced that it would destroy close to one million expired doses of Covid-19 vaccines.
The government said the jabs were delivered by international donors just before their expiry date, which did not give them enough time to distribute them around the country.
This is the first time the Nigerian health authorities have announced the number of vaccine doses to be destroyed.
The head of the National Primary Healthcare Development Agency, Dr Faisal Shuaib, told reporters that his agency was working with the country’s drug regulator to set a date for the destruction of the expired vaccines.
The authorities said no expired jabs have been administered in the country.
So far only 2% of Nigeria’s 200 million people has received two doses of the Covid vaccine.
The authorities now say they will no longer accept vaccines with short-shelf-life.
In Senegal, health authorities there say at least 200,000 vaccines have expired and another similar number are set to pass their end of of use date by December, the Reuters news agency reports.
A low uptake of the vaccines has been blamed.
“The main problem is vaccine hesitation… the number of cases is decreasing. They ask: ‘why is it important to get vaccinated if the illness is not there now’?”, Ousseynou Badiane, who is in charge of Senegal’s vaccine rollout, is quoted as saying.
