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At least

15 million doses of

covid-19

vaccines

have been disposed of in the United States since March 1,

NBC

announced

on Wednesday, citing information obtained from that country's health authorities.

The number of wasted doses was reported by states or pharmacies that administer the vaccines to the

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

(CDC), the nation's main federal public health agency.

This is probably an underreport, as several states or federal agencies are missing from the data.

The

reasons for throwing away doses can be diverse

: expiration date exceeded, dilution error, refrigeration problems, cracked bottles ... As a bottle contains several doses, once opened the other doses must be used in the hours that follow, or be discarded for lack of use.

While some providers reported thousands of doses thrown away in a single case, the most common reports are of only four doses thrown away at a time, according to NBC.

Two national pharmacy chains,

Walgreens

and

CVS,

reported

more than two million wasted doses each

, and

Walmart

and

Rite Aide

, more than one million.

According to previous data provided by the CDC, between the start of the US vaccination campaign in December 2020 and March, only about 200,000 doses had been wasted.

About 15 million later, most were during the

summer months (June through August)

, notes NBC.

This figure represents a

small fraction of the number of doses distributed

in total in the country since December (about 444 million), as well as the number of doses actually administered (371 million).

But

vaccination is still very uneven around the world

and the race to obtain doses is a reality, since several countries have so far not been able to immunize more than a small part of their population, especially in Africa.

"It's an equity issue,"

Tim Doran

, a professor of public health at New York University

, told

NBC

.

"There are very rich countries that access vaccines and simply throw away doses."

The United States announced in early August that it had shipped

110 million doses of vaccine

to

foreign countries

, and began distributing a portion of the Pfizer donation of 500 million doses promised to poor countries in late August.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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