Japan scraps 13.5 million AstraZeneca vaccine doses

The Japanese health ministry announced on Sept. 30 that some 13.5 million doses of AstraZeneca COVID 19 vaccine have been discarded as all of the remaining shots supplied by the British pharmaceutical company have expired.

Japan is about to end the administration of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

In December 2020, the Japanese government agreed to buy 120 million coronavirus vaccine doses from AstraZeneca. According to sources, only 200,000 doses have been sent to local governments and 120,000 doses have been administered.

Japan has since canceled a contract for 62.3 million doses, and of the already acquired supply, it has given 44 million doses free of charge to other countries. The remaining doses have been thrown out.

The government hasn't disclosed the purchase price or how much they will be reimbursed for the canceled doses because of the confidentiality agreement with the drug maker.

AstraZeneca's vaccine was once the world's leading candidate for practical use, but outside Japan there were rare cases of blood clots as a side effect. The government limited the administration of the AstraZeneca vaccine to those aged 40 and older, which was a sluggish distribution in Japan.