Malawi destroys 17,000 expired AstraZeneca vaccines

On May 19, 2021

Malawi destroyed nearly 17,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine that had expired in mid-April on Wednesday.

The health minister, Kumbize Kandodo said, at the Kamuzu Central Hospital in the capital Lilongwe, “The batch which had expired has been withdrawn from our system and has been destroyed.”

The southern African country has so far received three batches of the AstraZeneca vaccine, 300,000 doses under the Covax vaccine sharing facility, 50,000 from India and 102,000 from the African Union.

“The African Union batch had two weeks of shelf life, and unfortunately in those two weeks, we were not able to absorb everything, mostly due to the propaganda against the AstraZeneca vaccine,” Kandodo said.

“We tried to assure Malawians and give them the faith but wound up with 16,910 unusable doses of AstraZeneca, incinerated in a brief ceremony at the hospital.

“We don’t want to lose any vaccine because we have a lot of people to vaccinate but we have to remove all expired drugs from the system,” he added.

Since Malawi launched its vaccination drive in March, it has inoculated 300,000 people of its target to reach 11 million, or 60 percent of the population by the end of the year.

Kamila/Channels