Swiss forced to bin ten million Covid jabs

Swiss authorities have also purchased millions of doses of the new, updated, Moderna vaccine. © Keystone / Ennio Leanza

The doses are to be jettisoned after expiring earlier this week, health authorities said on Saturday. New jabs are on the way for this autumn’s vaccination efforts.

Of the 10.3 million doses, all made by the Moderna manufacturer, 2.5 million are currently in the Swiss army’s logistics base, while 7.8 million are in an external storage depot in Belgium, the government confirmed to the Keystone-SDA news agency. The story was first reported by the Swiss news magazine Beobachter.

The Federal Office for Public Health (FOPH) told Keystone-SDA that the procurement strategy was consciously based on buying more doses than the population (of 8.7 million) needed, in order to avoid becoming reliant on a vaccine that might have proved ineffective. Surplus doses also help in case of delivery problems or unmet contracts.

“Since the start of the pandemic, federal authorities have been following a procurement strategy based on different vaccine technologies and several manufacturers,” the FOPH said. The fact that both mRNA technologies bought by Switzerland – from Pfizer/BioNTech and notably Moderna – turned out to be effective, meant there was a large surplus.

The FOPH added that new Moderna vaccines, adapted to the latest Covid variants, were already starting to arrive. Some 3.5 million of them will be ready when the next vaccination campaign begins on October 10, it said. Earlier this month, the FOPH recommended that people aged 65 or over, as well as 16-64-year-olds with pre-existing health conditions, get a booster shot this autumn.

Numbers of new confirmed Covid-19 cases in Switzerland, as well as hospitalisations and deaths, have stabilised at a “relatively low level” over the past months. After two years of rolling measures, all remaining public health restrictions to fight the pandemic were lifted on April 1 this year.