Covid vaccine published by Moderna last week expected to expire soon, requiring Switzerland to destroy 10.3 million doses by the end of the year.
Keystone-ATS reported yesterday that vaccines eliminated after the doses ran out last Wednesday due to lack of availability.
There are 2.5 million doses stored in a Swiss army logistics base. While there 7.8 million doses stored in a Belgian external storage depot.
It estimated that the destroyed doses are worth 285 million Swiss francs according to a report on the Swiss news site Beobachter.
To respond to AFP’s inquiry, the health ministry cited its early procurement strategy for developing Covid-19 vaccines.
In order to avoid dependence on ineffective vaccines and to avoid delivery issues, it purchased doses from multiple manufacturers.
The success of mRNA-based vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech led to a large surplus of vaccines in Switzerland.
Covid vaccine expire in Switzerland
The covid vaccine will expire in Switzerland by the end of this year, according to Swissinfo. Swiss health minister Alain Berset said that the country was now in a better position to respond to an influenza pandemic. The ministry also said it had learned from this experience and would pursue a new procurement strategy for future vaccines.
The latest booster campaign, adapted to Switzerland’s needs, launched next month with 3.5 million doses of the new Moderna vaccine. Switzerland’s Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) said it had also learned lessons from its previous experience with the influenza pandemic in 2009-10. It said that as part of a new procurement strategy. It would only purchase vaccines from manufacturers with facilities approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
The outbreak of Covid in Switzerland started last January, and almost 70 percent of the country’s 8.7 million residents vaccinated against it. The FOPH said it was currently examining the possibility of using information from its vaccination register to launch an online portal that would allow citizens to access their own health data.
The agency said that this would make it possible for people to better understand why they needed a particular vaccine and what side effects they could expect.
