That's for the country as a whole, though. I'd expect it to vary quite a bit from state to state. In some of the low vaccination rate/high COVID rate states there were pharmacies having almost their entire allotment expire due to low demand.
It will be interesting to see the geographic distribution when the site gets this part done:
> I’m working on mapping all retail pharmacy locations to waste over time
That caveat doesn't seem particularly important. The worst case is that 97% of all vaccination sites are perfectly efficient and 3% of them just dump all their allocated vaccines into the trash. Being within 3% of the lower bound doesn't leave much wiggle room.
Worth noting that the big pharmacies do not, from casual eyeball, appear to be wasting out of proportion to the amount they administered. (The U.S. allocated more than half of all doses to the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program and big pharmacies are supermajority of that.)
Where are the majority of vaccines produced ending up nowadays? Rich countries placed orders greater than they could possibly use, and now rates of take-up are slowing in those countries. Presumably vaccine is being produced as fast as ever to fulfil those orders. Is Covax actually getting the excess to the rest of the world?
In fairness to the rich countries, when they placed orders no one really knew how many people would be willing to get vaccinated. So naturally they estimated on the high side.
Not that logistics aren't a real issue and just because some waste could have been prevented if only we could have magically teleported it to a person who needed it exactly when they needed it, doesn't mean that there was any realistic way the wastage could have been prevented without creating other, worse issues.
I'm not surprised Walgreens is at the top by wastage.
They have some of the most horrible bureaucracy when it came to vaccine administration. Appointment times meant nothing and it took close to 10min/patient to progress in the line.
For my 2nd dose, their system broke down entirely and rather than inform everyone in the line, they decided to run around like chickens with their heads cut off and then take a lunch break, keeping everyone wondering what's going on.
Yup. Manufacturers will need to move to single dose vials pretty soon. I was talking to pharmacists that reconstitute a 10 dose vial to vaccinate someone and have to toss the other 9 doses as they go bad.
11M wasted doses is frightening. That would vaccinate the entire population of New Zealand.
But do remember, I’m sure New Zealand would also end up wasting a decent number of doses in the process of vaccinating their population.
Making things convenient often requires using resources less efficiently, and we can’t get everyone vaccinated unless getting vaccinated is convenient.
By April/May in the US getting vaccines was very convenient and there was barely any wastage. The wastage is because we are trying to make it convenient for the antivaxxers to get it hoping that they'd change their mind, rather than help other countries.
It's such a shame, too. You can likely re-freeze the spikevax vials with partial shots to be used at a later date, but that's too uncontrolled to add to the EUA/BLA label. Comirnaty is (was) in phosphate buffer and saline, which you really cannot re-freeze. They did just request a formulation change to the same composition as spikevax (or at least very similar), which should also get rid of the saline dilution step making it overall much easier to administer.
Not sure about that. When the mass vaccination phase will end, sure, but now, with adequate planning, we can still make good use of these multi-dose vials. 3% waste is bad but not that bad.
I remember in the beginning of the vaccination campaign that the vials themselves were in short order. It is probably all sorted out but making 10 times more will create additional logistics and production challenges. Is it worth it in order to save less than 3% of the substance?
And there are solutions to the wasted doses. Basically, plan the vaccinations ahead to have the required number of people and setup a waiting list so that if someone doesn't show up, call someone else. Where I got vaccinated, I asked them the question about the potentially wasted extra doses, and they proudly told me that using that method they didn't waste a single dose out of the 10000+ they administered.
EDIT: As for the New-Zealand reference, we can also say that we could have vaccinated 0.5% if India with all these doses, which sounds much less impressive. It is all a matter of proportion. I also think that in the case of New-Zealand, right now, being a remote island is more of a problem than the availability of doses, thankfully, it is also helps them keeping covid at bay.
But the "plan the vaccinations" doesn't happen in countries that are at a point where most people who can be bothered to make an appointment already got vaccinated and they rely on making it easily available for walk-ins in as many places as possible to reach the rest.
Vaccines aren't free but aren't expensive to produce. If people are just walking in off the street to be vaccinated, with no planning, then it is probably past the point where 3% wastage is material.
Waste not want not, a 3% loss isn't great. But this must be one of the fastest rollouts of a vaccine in human history - it just doesn't matter that much. The 97% that is not wasted is the important part.
Vaccines are also in extremely limited supply, globally speaking, and it's not a great look for countries to act is if throwing away millions of doses isn't a big deal while other countries are limited by not getting enough.