Health Canada says almost 1.5 million doses of COVID\u002D19 vaccines held in a national inventory have expired since January.
That includes more than 420,000 doses of Moderna’s Spikevax that hit the end of their shelf life on Tuesday. Those doses had already seen their expiration date pushed back two months.
Some provinces are extending fourth doses to high-risk populations as well and the National Advisory Committee on Immunization this week issued more urgent advice for younger adults and teens to get their third dose as the sixth wave of COVID-19 keeps growing. Last fall, a Canadian Press survey of provincial governments on wasted doses found at least 120,000 doses sent to provinces had expired, but the data didn’t include numbers from Ontario, which refused to respond to the question.
Canada has only donated 15 million of the 38 million doses it promised to share from its own supplies, but demand for those has also fallen this year. The COVAX vaccine sharing alliance distributing most donations has slowed its requests in recent weeks as supplies exceeded the ability of countries to get doses into arms.
Canada now has 18 million doses in its national stockpile and the vast majority will expire within the next four months. That includes 4,200 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine that run out of time at the end of April, more than 900,000 doses of the pediatric Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that expire in June, and 3.1 million doses from a recent shipment of the new vaccine from Novavax that expire at the end of August.
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