US federal, state and local governments as well as drug stores have wasted and been forced to scrap more than 82 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccines over the past year-and-a-half, NBC News reported on Monday
WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 06th June, 2022) US federal, state and local governments as well as drug stores have wasted and been forced to scrap more than 82 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccines over the past year-and-a-half, NBC news reported on Monday.
In all, drug stores or pharmacies, state governments, US territories and Federal agencies have scrapped 82.1 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from December 2020 through mid-May 2022, NBC News cited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as saying.
That quantity amounted to more than 11% of all the vaccines for the pandemic that the US government distributed, the report said.
The figure on wasted vaccines is 16 million doses higher than the 65 million doses that the CDC acknowledged had been wasted in mid-February just under four months ago in a communication to US media, the report also said.
Just two national retail pharmacy chains, CVS and Walmart, were responsible for more than 25% - or more than 20 million doses - of the vaccine shots wasted in the United States in that time period, in part due to the sheer volume of vaccine they handled, the report added.
Five other pharmacies or dialysis centers - Health Mart, DaVita, Rite Aid, Publix and Costco - wasted more than 25% of the COVID-19 vaccine doses they received, according to the report.
