There is an excess of surrealism here, between the vaccination process, which is unanimously agreed upon by those concerned with its “brake”, and an administration that does not hesitate to open its arms to new gifts despite the stored surplus of vaccines. Is the crisis here in estimating the priorities? Or is it a crisis of malpractice?
Today, the Ministry owns more than 400,000 doses of the “Pfizer” vaccine, of which not a single dose has been released so far, which Lebanon obtained through the Covax platform. This means that they are “vaccines for a price that Lebanon will pay in part.” Despite this, Al-Sadr remained open to receiving more. Thus, in addition to what is “under study”, the Ministry of Health received at the beginning of this year 429,600 doses (43,000 vials) of the “Moderna” vaccine, a donation from Denmark. The gift had two validity dates: the first expires in the first third of this month, and the remaining part ends at the beginning of next month. Unlike the vaccines that arrived previously, it is not expected that new documents will arrive to extend the validity of the “Moderna” vaccine, as the dates placed on the packages, according to the sources, “are the extended validity dates”, and this means that if they are not spent, they will be destroyed.
Two months following the donation arrived, and on the threshold of the third month in which a large part of the vaccines expire, the Ministry of Health has not released a single dose. The Minister of Health, Firas Al-Abyad, attributes this to “necessary matters, including conducting the necessary training for workers in the centers on how to deal with the new vaccine, and the changes that are supposed to be made on the platform.”
For this reason, the ministry – belatedly – took a decision to transfer the bulk of the “Pfizer” centers (regarding 70 centers) to centers to receive the “Moderna” vaccines, with the latter becoming the only vaccine for those over the age of eighteen, while “Pfizer” is limited to those who are Without it. However, the decision faced “resistance” from some centers for several reasons, including the suspension of the vaccination process in some areas. In this context, sources in the Ministry of Health indicate that “huge quantities of Pfizer vaccines were retrieved regarding a month ago, more than 20,000 doses sent by the centers in batches following their expiration date,” expecting the number to rise further. The center, which used to vaccinate thousands of people per week, now has a share of only 20. The worst thing is that these quantities will “go to spoil.”
As for the second reason, it is that “the training received by the workers in the centers on the Moderna vaccine was not sufficient, as is evident from the reviews that the ministry receives from some centers where they complain that their workers have not received the necessary training.” The third and most important reason is that “Moderna” differs from the “Pfizer” and “AstraZeneca” vaccine in that the amount withdrawn from the vaccine vial in the first dose is completely different from the amount assumed in the second dose, which constitutes confusion among workers, especially since it was not distributed to The centers of the syringe for that vaccine, which means that there is a margin of error here. In addition to these reasons, there are logistical matters related to changing appointments from Pfizer to Moderna. As for what the ministry did not pay attention to, it “cannot impose on people the vaccines it wants.”
429,000 doses of Moderna vaccine and thousands of other vaccines are destroyed
The question here is: What if these vaccines are not dispensed within the remaining “life” of their validity? The answer is not likely to be multiple options. According to the White Minister, “When we reach the specified date, we will not use them anymore,” which means that they are going to spoil. If the minister expresses some optimism in the sense that it does not all end at the same time, others have reservations, considering that “what will be destroyed is greater than what will be taken,” and that thousands of vaccines will be destroyed, along with thousands of others “stored today in preparation for spoilage.” This applies to all the gifts we receive “with a short life,” which is an implicit acknowledgment that what comes from gifts has no actual function except that “the donating state gives us what it wants to throw away,” according to sources who follow the vaccination process. However, the ministry never rejects gifts on the basis that “the wolf does not die and the herd does not perish.” Al-Abyadh confirms that the ministry recently rejected donations with close expiration dates, including two donations for the “AstraZeneca” and “Pfizer” vaccines, while it accepted a third donation of vaccines for children.
What is worse than the idea of the “landfill” that the country has become for a number of vaccine-donating countries, is that the ministry deliberately stores what expires because there is no mechanism to allow it to be spoiled, especially since working on this matter comes with no financial costs. Therefore, part of the drug storage warehouses – which are few in the first place – are used to store the perishable vaccines and medicines.
