Brazilian Ministry of Health Let 39 Million Doses of Covid Vaccine Expire

Current management blames the Bolsonaro government and says that another 20 million doses will expire in six months

Brasília

The Ministry of Health lost at least 38.9 million doses of vaccines against Covid-19, valued at around BRL 2 billion. Of this total, approximately 2 million units were discarded and 31 million have been sent for incineration. The remaining 5.9 million will still be sent for disposal, according to the Ministry of Health. On its website, the department states that 399 million doses of the Covid vaccine have been applied to date in the country. Health members blame the government of former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) for the accumulation of doses. They also state that they have been studying the possibility to donate vaccines to other countries as one of the ways to avoid further losses.

The cabinet says that 20 million does will expire in six months, with 5 million of those expiring in the next three months. States and municipalities still tend to reject batches with a short expiration date. Precisely because of the risk of the product's expiring.

Current Secretary of Health and Environment Surveillance at the Ministry of Health, Ethel Maciel said that, during the transition of government, the Bolsonaro administration did not even share data on stocks with the team of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT). "We got a government with a stock full of expired and about-to-expire vaccines, while those we needed were not in stock. There wasn't even a contract [ordering the doses] in the case of pediatric and bivalent vaccines", she said.

Translated by Cassy Dias

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