10,000 ASTRAZENECA VACCINE EXPIRES

About 10,000 doses of the AstraZeneca Vaccine that the country received from the African Union (AU) on 26 March, 2021has been confirmed expired.

Confirming the development, Principal Secretary in the ministry of health, Dr. Charles Mwansambo was quick to disclose that the expiry is due to the short span that the doses had.

“We received 102, 000 doses from the African Union on 26^th March. Unfortunately, these had a short expiry period. They are expiring on the 13^th of April and I am glad to report that most of these have been used.

“As of Monday, we still had about 20, 000 doses remaining; so, I am hoping that once we get the statistics at the end of Tuesday, we should be around 10, 000 doses,” said Dr. Mwamsambo.

Dr. Mwansambo has since disclosed that the proper procedure will be followed to dispose of the expired vaccine.

“They cannot be used. Once every medication has gone past its expiry time, cannot be used. Remember we have a total of 520 thousand doses of the vaccine.

“60 thousand of them came from the COVAX Facility. Most of these are expiring sometime in June. We also received some from the Indian government and this is 102 thousand.

“I must say that our team is working flat out to make sure that we use most of these.

There is a procedure to dispose of expired drugs. We follow the government system and it will be treated like any other expired drug,” he said.