Belgium will have to destroy €131 million worth of medical supplies and vaccines against Covid-19 soon, as they have expired or are no longer usable.
When Covid-19 paralysed the world in 2020, nearly all countries were faced with a shortage of medical supplies. At the time, Belgium's caretaker government was making every effort to find face masks and test material for the country, blindly purchasing everything that was available.
Especially during the second quarter of that year, many purchases were made to have as much reserve as possible for the waves that awaited Belgium. Now, however, part of that material has to be destroyed: some products, such as tests and reagents, have expired while others, such as certain face masks (FFP2), did not meet the standards.
"In times of an unprecedented health crisis with great uncertainty, a government must do everything it can to protect its population," said Federal Health Minister Frank Vandenbroucke. "That is why in the first wave of the Covid pandemic, at a time of scarcity, the previous government massively purchased medical supplies such as face masks to endure several and successive Covid waves. We now have to destroy the surpluses of these because they have expired."
Played it safe
The same applies to vaccines that are no longer usable and that were purchased by the current government; Belgium joined the European procurement programme when the first vaccines were developed. "We played it safe and bought enough vaccines, so anyone who wanted to get vaccinated could get vaccinated," said Vandenbroucke.
Part of this stock has since also expired, and another part can no longer be donated to developing countries. The vaccines at the time were designed based on the first variant of the virus (from the Chinese city of Wuhan) and are therefore no longer up to date.
Together, it concerns about 3.5 million doses of all Covid-19 vaccines – just 6.45% of all vaccine doses planned for Belgium so far (54.3 million).
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Vandenbroucke noted that the destruction of vaccines will take place in almost all EU Member States. Additionally, the Public Health Ministry pointed out that the number of vaccines to be destroyed in Belgium is relatively lower than in most other Member States, thanks to the high vaccination rate.
The value of the stock that is to be destroyed is €131 million, and the cost of the destruction is estimated at €310,000.
In the meantime, a platform has been set up to advise Vandenbroucke on the management of the federal strategic stock. When compiling this stock, the aim is to achieve one that is sustainable, with an explicit obligation to avoid the destruction of products as much as possible.
