There are currently 762,250 vaccine doses from Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca in refrigerators at the Statens Serum Institut (SSI).
SSI informs TV2.
A solution must be found, as most people are getting too old. Most urgent is more than half a million AstraZeneca vaccines, which expire over the next three months – the majority in July.
The vaccines cannot be given away under the Covax program of the World Health Organization (WHO), which distributes vaccines to Africa, as the organization only distributes doses that can be sent directly from the manufacturer to the recipient country.
This does not apply to vaccines that have been around Denmark, for example.
One of the reasons is logistics, as it is difficult to administer small consignments of vaccines. This is explained by Flemming Konradsen, who is an expert in global health at the University of Copenhagen.
– It is simply easier to coordinate large clumps, which come from one central location at one agreed time and according to one approved plan for rollout, says Flemming Konradsen to TV2.
Therefore, the solution may instead be to ship the vaccines to a single country, and according to Jyllands-Posten there is also a political majority for that in the Folketing.
Flemming Konradsen estimates that it may be necessary to look at countries a little closer – for example in the EU. Denmark has already donated almost 60,000 AstraZeneca vaccines to the German state of Schleswig-Holstein.
The two vaccines have been taken out of the Danish vaccination program because the Danish Health and Medicines Authority assesses that the risk of rare cases of blood clots is greater than the benefits of avoiding hospitalization due to coronary heart disease.
However, the government has asked the agency to reconsider that decision, and an announcement is expected in about a week and a half.
There are 233,850 vaccines from Johnson & Johnson refrigerated. But here there is no acute problem in relation to expiration date as they can last till 2023.
A very small proportion of the vaccines that are refrigerated are used in the voluntary vaccination program, but so far there have been only a few thousand.
Source: The Nordic Page