Dresden (dpa/sn) – After the state corona vaccination centers in Saxony were closed in mid-December, the whereabouts of unvaccinated doses will be checked. “The doses that were not vaccinated before the closure are now brought together centrally and the inventory and best-before dates are first checked,” said a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Social Affairs at the request of the German Press Agency. According to this, around 298,700 doses were administered in 2022. It was said that vaccines procured both this year and last year were used.
The German Red Cross procured a total of 163,982 doses for state vaccination this year, the spokeswoman said. “After the state vaccination centers in the ten counties were closed on December 20, 3,516 vaccine doses were returned.” In addition to the inventory and the best-before date, it is also checked whether the cans can be passed on or reused.
One difficulty in avoiding superfluous vaccines was the wave-like development in demand, it said. It was often difficult or impossible to predict: “For example, demand was very high at the end of 2021 and then surprisingly dropped massively after the turn of the year – with the simultaneous assumption that an even larger vaccination capacity is needed.” This meant that a comparatively large number of vaccine doses had to be disposed of at the beginning of 2022.
