At least 215 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines purchased by EU countries at the height of the pandemic have since been thrown away at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of €4 billion, an analysis by POLITICO reveals. And that's almost certainly an underestimate, Politico reports.
Since the first coronavirus vaccines were approved in late 2020, EU countries have collectively taken delivery of 1.5 billion doses (more than three for every person in Europe). Many of these now lie in landfills across the Continent.
Calculations based on available data show that EU countries have discarded an average of 0.7 jabs for every member of their population. Top of the scale is Estonia, which binned more than one dose per inhabitant, followed closely by Germany, which also threw away the largest raw volume of jabs.
If this average waste rate is projected across the rest of the EU, it would equal more than 312 million destroyed vaccines.
