EU countries destroy COVID vaccines worth $4.4 billion

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 four billion euros ($4.4 billion). And that's almost certainly an underestimate.

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, according to Politico.

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.

It's not easy to discover how many vaccines have been thrown out. Governments, including the EU's second-most populous country France, are reluctant to reveal the scale of the waste.

POLITICO's calculations are based on numbers from 19 European countries — 15 that supplied us with direct figures, and four where volumes were reported in local media. Some figures date from as recently as this month; the oldest come from December 2022.

The passage of time means the figures we received are conservative, with the real number of discarded vaccines likely much higher.

Germany, for example, provided its waste figures to POLITICO in June; at the time it had another 120 million vaccines sitting in storage. Vaccine-makers have also since introduced newer versions that are adapted to the latest coronavirus variants, making older jabs obsolete and more likely to be discarded.

POLITICO estimates the value of the 215 million wasted vaccines at more than four billion euros, based on vaccine prices reported in the media (they have not been made public). For countries that only reported the total number of vaccines destroyed, without breaking it down by vaccine type, POLITICO used a weighted average price of 19.39 euros calculated from data given by countries that provided a breakdown.

Again, this figure is almost certainly a minimum. But even four billion euros is a considerable sum, equal to a large infrastructure project or to the annual health care spending of Croatia.

POLITICO asked all EU countries to share data on the vaccines that had gone unused, but only 15 chose to disclose the figure. The others declined to share the number, or didn't respond.

Many of the vaccines in question were purchased at the height of the pandemic in 2021 when the EU, the US and the UK were all scrambling to secure a limited number of doses. It was during that frenzied time that the EU entered into its single biggest contract to purchase 1.1 billion doses from Pfizer and BioNTech.

It's easy to forget how uncertain things were in 2021, and the EU deal was lauded at the time. But both the size and the timing of the agreement turned out to be problematic. Countries were locked into buying doses even as the pandemic subsided, while efforts to donate excess jabs to third countries were thwarted by falling demand and logistics issues.

The repercussions are more than financial. Questions around how the big Pfizer contract was negotiated have dogged Commission President Ursula von der Leyen ever since the New York Times reported that the EU chief had exchanged messages with Pfizer's CEO in the run-up to the deal.

The contract has already been renegotiated by the European Commission under pressure from EU countries suffering from a vaccine glut. Both Poland and Hungary stopped accepting vaccines and are being sued by Pfizer for non-payment. In Romania, prosecutors want to lift immunity for its former prime minister and two former health ministers, claiming excessive vaccine purchases caused more than 1 billion euros in damages to the state.

In the meantime, the jabs will keep coming, with the revised contract with Pfizer locking European countries into buying vaccines until at least 2027.