Health officials in Georgia sounded the alarm Wednesday over the slow pace of coronavirus vaccinations, after some 17,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine had to be destroyed because they expired, IgbereTV reports.
The Black Sea nation is in the midst of a devastating new wave of the pandemic despite vaccines being widely available.
The country of 3.7 million people saw record numbers of daily cases this week, with 6,024 new infections on Wednesday, and was the country with the fifth-highest number of cases per 100,000 inhabitants in the week to Tuesday, according to a tally from official sources compiled by AFP.
Overall Georgia has reported nearly 733,000 cases and more than 10,000 deaths.
“The government has made available a wide choice of internationally approved Covid-19 vaccines, but the rollout has slowed significantly since the summer,” the deputy director of Georgia’s National Centre for Disease Control, Paata Imnadze, told AFP.
“As a result, we were forced to destroy 17,000 expired AstraZeneca vaccines.”
If the trend is not reversed, “we will soon face… a sharp increase in mortality,” Imnadze said.
This summer the ex-Soviet republic’s government set up vaccination points in shopping malls and sent medical brigades to villages to speed up the rollout
