Namibia faces destroying over 260,000 Covid vaccines

Namibia might be forced to destroy up to 268,000 Covid-19 vaccines which are nearing their expiry date due to a sluggish jab uptake, a senior health official said Friday.

The southern African country is struggling to convince its 2.5 million citizens to get inoculated with only 11.6 percent of the population vaccinated so far.

There are 52,261 AstraZeneca shots due to expire on Tuesday while 215,996 Pfizer jabs will reach their use-by date in January and February next year, according to health and social services director Ben Nangombe.

"As a general practice, any medicine that reaches its end of shelf life without being used, is disposed of as per prescribed procedure," Nangombe told AFP.

"Covid-19 vaccines... that are not utilised by the time of reaching their stated expiry dates will be disposed of accordingly," he said.

Nangombe said the decision to dispose of the vaccines was an unfortunate lost opportunity for people to be vaccinated.

He added that it was "a cause of concern that valuable resources such as these will end up being disposed of because of slow uptake."

But Health Minister Kalumbi Shangula downplayed the number of vaccines that could be destroyed, saying only around 40,000 shots had already expired because they had a short shelf-life.

"We have received some... vaccines with a short shelf-life and it was not possible to consume all of them within the short shelf-life," Shangula told AFP.

But "it's not a very significant number," he said.

"The rest of the vaccines are all within the shelf life which we are using."

News about the looming vaccine disposal comes as a new variant recently named Omicron was detected in the southern African region, triggering a travel ban imposed by Britain and slew of other countries including France, Germany, Italy and Singapore.