Malawi destroys 17,000 expired AstraZeneca vaccines due to reluctant citizens
Published May 22, 2021 9:33pm
Malawi on Wednesday destroyed nearly 17,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine that had expired in mid-April, with the health minister blaming "propaganda" for many Malawians' reluctance to receive the jab.
"The batch which had expired (has) been withdrawn from our system and has been destroyed," Health Minister Kumbize Kandodo said at the Kamuzu Central Hospital in the capital Lilongwe.
The southern African country has so far received three batches of the AstraZeneca vaccine -- 300,000 doses under the Covax vaccine sharing facility, 50,000 from India and 102,000 from the African Union.
Kandodo said the African Union batch had "two weeks of shelf life, and unfortunately, in those two weeks, we were not able to absorb everything, mostly due to the propaganda against the AstraZeneca vaccine."