At least 1M vaccine doses wasted

An informal survey shows that at least one million doses of Canada's COVID-19 vaccine supply have gone to waste.

The Canadian Press asked health ministries across the country to provide how many doses had to be disposed of because they had expired or for other reasons.

Not all were able to reply by deadline. Some jurisdictions — including Yukon and Prince Edward Island — only provided the number of expired doses. Ontario refused to provide any information.

The survey suggests at least 1,016,669 doses have been rejected since vaccines first arrived last December. That's about 2.6 per cent of the entire supply delivered to the provinces and territories that provided their numbers.

Unused doses vary wildly across Canada. Alberta reported disposing of 10 per cent of its doses; Nova Scotia 0.3 per cent.

Some waste is to be expected, but Canada should be striving for the lowest amount possible, said Dr. Ross Upshur of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health and co-chair of the World Health Organization's COVID-19 ethics working group.

It's difficult to know if Canada is meeting that goal because of poor data-sharing and a lack of transparency, said Upshur.

“It's a complex, complex, complex issue,” Upshur said.

Provinces gave various reasons for wasted doses. They included dropped vials or syringes, defective syringes or damaged vials, poor dose management and expired doses. Many could not provide a full breakdown.

Without complete data it's hard to know whether Canada's vaccine supply is being managed effectively, said Upshur. For example, only some provinces could provide the number of doses that expired. In those provinces and territories, about 0.45 per cent of their vaccines had to be tossed because of an expiry date, about 120,578 doses.

“A million doses sounds like a lot ... but then you have to ask the questions of what were the factors when you break down (what) led to the wastage of the vaccines,” said Upshur.

Alberta's Ministry of Health said wastage has become unavoidable because fewer people are coming in for shots.

As provinces begin rolling out their booster programs to fend off new waves of COVID-19, vaccine eligibility could lead to more waste, said Dr. Leyla Asadi, an Edmonton-based infectious disease doctor.

“If doses are being discarded because of a lack of eligibility or strict criteria, then that's inappropriate because we know globally there is a gross shortage of vaccines,” Asadi said.

Alberta has hundreds of thousands of doses stockpiled, she said, yet pharmacists she's spoken to say they've been told to discard doses rather than give boosters to non-eligible people.