by Andrea Gebbia from Ehrendingen (Switzerland)
At the end of March 2022, the Swiss government had already withdrawn the latest preventive measures against Covid-19, declaring, in fact, the end of the pandemic. As reported, among others, by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Swissinfo and SRF, based on a service of the French-speaking Swiss radio and television, RTS, currently 620,000 doses of Moderna vaccine have expired: 200,000 are stored in the refrigerators of the various cantonal warehouses and 420,000 in the Army Pharmacy. Disposal costs are estimated at one franc for every kilogram of vaccine to be thrown away.
However, extending the shelf life of the Moderna vaccine from 7 to 9 months failed to solve the expiration problem and save these vaccines. Even because the number of vaccinations in recent months in the Swiss Confederation it dropped dramatically: Only 1,200 doses were administered in May.
The Federal Office of Public Health, UFSP (i.e. the Swiss Ministry of Health) stated that many more doses were purposely purchased than necessary to be able to guarantee adequate vaccination coverage for the entire Swiss population.
In February 2022, the UFSP had communicated and decided that, by mid-2022, up to a maximum of 15 million doses of Covid vaccines, if not used in Switzerland, would be donated to Covax, the United Nations program for ensure fair coverage and vaccination distribution even in the poorest countries in the world. Precisely for this, one wonders why the expiring doses were not made available at an adequate time for the Covax program, leaving them instead to perish in warehouses. The UFSP says the number of doses to be allocated to Covax is currently a matter of discussion between Covax itself, the producers and the Swiss government. The problem is complex because poor countries also have limited capacity to receive vaccines.
The Zurich NGO “Public Eye”, with its head of health policies, Gabriela Hertig, harshly criticized the uneven distribution of vaccines and even spoke of a veto by pharmaceutical companies. In this way, the pharmaceutical companies would like to prevent richer countries from donating surplus vaccine doses to poorer nations.
Finally, according to the latest available data, there are an additional 7 million doses of Covid vaccines waiting in the refrigerators of the Army Pharmacy. The Swiss government bought 34 million doses for 2022, 20 for the first half of the year and 14 for the second: in this way, any person who wanted could even be vaccinated 5 or 6 times! An almost ironic situation, given that the anti-Covid vaccination rate in Switzerland is rather mediocre compared to many other nations (Sources ourworldindata.org: 180 doses administered per 100 inhabitants and 69% of the population fully vaccinated; in Italy: 228 and 79%) .