প্রকাশ: 25/09/2022
Switzerland will need to destroy 10.3 million doses of
Moderna's vaccine against Covid-19, after they expired this week, the health
ministry said Saturday.
The ministry said it had no choice but to eliminate the jabs
after the doses expired last Wednesday, according to Keystone-ATS.
It told the news agency that 2.5 million of the doses were
being stored at a Swiss army logistics base and 7.8 million were in an external
storage depot in Belgium.
The ministry confirmed an initial report on Swiss news site
Beobachter, which estimated that the doses set for destruction were worth
around 280 million Swiss francs ($285 million).
The health ministry, which did not immediately respond to a
request for comment from AFP, pointed to its early procurement strategy in the
race to develop vaccines to counter the global Covid-19 pandemic.
It ordered doses from various manufacturers to avoid
becoming reliant on vaccines that might eventually prove ineffective and to
guard against any delivery problems.
The fact that vaccines based on mRNA technology, from
Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, turned out to be effective, left Switzerland with
a large surplus of doses.
In June, the Swissinfo news site estimated that Switzerland
had an excess of some 38 million doses of various Covid vaccines, that would
expire before the year-end.
The ministry said that some 3.5 million doses of the new,
adapted Moderna vaccine would be available when Switzerland kicks off its next
booster campaign next month.
Switzerland, which has counted 13,556 deaths from Covid
since the start of the pandemic, has fully vaccinated nearly 70 percent of its
population of 8.7 million.
– BSS/AFP
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