Nigeria destroys 1M expired Covid 19 vaccines

Nigeria on Wednesday destroyed over one million expired doses of AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines.

The expired doses were destroyed at a landfill in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, a week after the nation said it would no longer accept donated COVID-19 vaccines with short shelf lives.

According to the head of Nigerian National Primary Health Care Development Agency, Faisal Shuaib accepted the donations with the intension of protecting its citizenry but later released that some doses had “nearly reached its expiry date. So actually for example some of these vaccines came in with shelf lives of about 4 weeks.”

On Tuesday (December 21), the country recorded 2,123 new COVID-19 infections, the highest daily tally since January this year and the second highest since the pandemic.

National Food and Drug Administration Director Professor Mojisola Adeyeye said they “are one of the few agencies in Africa that tests our vaccine before use” and that they had already informed donors about this.

Vaccination rapidly improving in the most populous country in Africa, which intends to fully vaccinate 55 million of its 206 million citizens before February 2022. Currently, only 2% of the population are fully vaccinated.