According to the Associated Press, Canada will toss away around 13.6 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine since it could not find any takers either at home or overseas. AstraZeneca secured a contract with Canada in 2020 to get 20 million doses of their vaccine, and 2.3 million Canadians received at least one dosage, primarily between March and June 2021.
Following concerns in the spring of 2021 about AstraZeneca’s uncommon but possibly catastrophic blood clots, Canada concentrated on exploiting its huge supply of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines. Canada pledged to contribute the remainder of its acquired supply, totaling 17.7 million doses, in July 2021. However, Health Canada announced Tuesday that, despite attempts to achieve the goal, 13.6 million doses had expired and would have to be discarded.
According to the Associated Press, the statement stated that ‘because to low demand for the vaccine and recipient nation issues with distribution and absorption, they were not accepted’. In all, Canada gave 8.9 million doses of the Astra Zeneca vaccine, 4.8 million from its main stockpile and 4.1 million via the COVAX vaccine-sharing programme.
Approximately 85 percent of Canadians are completely vaccinated, compared to 61 percent of the global population and only 16 percent of those in the world’s poorest countries. AstraZeneca, a British pharmaceutical company that has already developed a widely used coronavirus vaccine, recently completed a phase-three trial for a treatment for people at risk of death from coronavirus, focusing primarily on participants who were ‘at high risk of progression to severe Covid-19’.
‘Despite vaccination success, many people, including older persons, those with co-morbidities, and people who are immunocompromised, are still at risk of poor outcomes from severe Covid-19,’ stated trial leader Hugh Montgomery, professor of intensive care medicine at University College London.
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