They don’t know the waste of COVID-19 vaccines in the United States

Nashville, Tennessee While millions of people wait their turn to receive the new coronavirus vaccine, small amounts of the valuable doses have been constantly wasted in the United States.

It’s a bleak reality that experts always recognized was going to happen. Thousands of doses have been wasted in Tennessee, Florida, Ohio, and many other states. The reasons range from poor administration to hundreds of doses accidentally thrown away. However, it is not known how many doses of the vaccine have been discarded, despite local authorities saying the number remains low.

Waste is of course common in vaccination campaigns around the world. For example, millions of doses of the flu vaccine are thrown away every year. According to an estimate by the World Health Organization, up to half of the vaccines from previous campaigns at the international level have been wasted because they were poorly treated, because nobody asked for them or because they had expired.

In comparison, the waste of the new coronavirus vaccine appears to be quite small, although the US government has yet to release numbers revealing its magnitude. Authorities have said this could change soon as more information is gathered from the states.

Meanwhile, state health agencies are much more likely to tell how quickly vaccines were delivered, while remaining silent about the number of doses that end up in the trash.

The Ohio Department of Health declined to use the term “wasted” when The Associated Press asked for a total number of doses to have ended up in the trash. Instead, an agency spokeswoman said the state monitors “useless” vaccines reported by state suppliers.

“With 3.2 million doses administered through March 9, 2021, the 3,396 inoperable doses reported by state providers represent approximately 0.1% of the doses administered, less than the CDC’s expectation of 5% inoperable doses.”Alicia Shoults of the Ohio Department of Health said in an email, using the acronym for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In Tennessee, wasted, wasted, or useless doses are not publicly reported in the state’s online COVID-19 vaccine registry.

And in Florida, state director of public health, Dr. Scott Rivkees, recently called for an audit after more than 1,000 doses of damaged vaccines were reported in Palm Beach County last month. When a review of that audit was requested, the state said this week that it would provide those documents through a request for public records, which it was developing.

The federal government has also refrained from publishing the figures on tainted or useless doses, although it noted that states should report such wastage.