Federal Govt Gets Rid Of Over 1M Expired COVID-19 Vaccines

Federal Govt Gets Rid Of Over 1M Expired COVID-19 Vaccines

The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, with the National Primary Health Care Development Agency and the Abuja Environmental Protection Agency, have gotten rid of over 1,066,214 doses of expired AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines, aso Naija reports.

The vaccines were destroyed at the Gosa Dumping site on Tuesday in Abuja.

AstraZeneca plc is a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company with its headquarters at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in Cambridge, England.

This batch is said to be part of the 2,594,100  doses received on the 11th and 29th of Oct of and only 1,527,886 were administered.

The batches of the ones destroyed got expired in November.

At the destruction site, the NPHCDA Executive Director/Chief Executive Officer, Dr Faisal Shuaib, commended health workers on their efforts to help administer the dose, describing them as the “heroes of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign because they worked round the clock to make sure the vaccine were used maximally”.

Earlier in December, the NPHCDA had announced that it would destroy expired COVID-19 it after they had been pulled from circulation.

Authorities also acknowledged that logistics and bottlenecks involved in clearing the vaccines also led to a loss of valuable time in distributing the vaccines across the country.