Malawi's minister of health places expired vaccines into an incinerator. Photo: Malawi government
Malawi has publicly burned around 20,000 expired doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in an attempted transparency push. Health authorities in the southern African nation claimed that the decision was to reassure Malawians that the government would not use expired vaccines in their inoculation drive.
“We are destroying publicly in order to stay accountable to Malawians that the vaccines that expired are not being used during the vaccination campaign,” the minister of health, Khumbize Kandodo Chiponda, wrote on Twitter. “On behalf of the government I assure all Malawians that no one will be given an expired COVID vaccine.”Malawi has successfully administered around 80 percent of its initial allocation of 102,000 vaccines. The shortfall came not as a result of vaccine hesitancy, the minister claimed, but because the vaccines arrived in late March, just over two weeks before they were due to expire. “The reason the vaccines expired is not because we had too many to use or absorb in the vaccination campaign,” Chiponda said, “but rather they were of short shelf life by the time we received the donation.”The World Health Organisation (WHO) has previously recommended that countries do not get rid of their expired doses. However, the organisation has since updated its guidance to allow countries to safely dispose of their out-of-date stock.“Any vaccine that has passed its expiry date, including Covishield, should not be administered,” the WHO confirmed in a statement. “While discarding vaccines is deeply regrettable in the context of any immunisation programme, WHO recommends that these expired doses should be removed from the distribution chain and safely disposed.”