EU countries have wasted billions of euros of taxpayers’ money by throwing out unnecessary Covid injections, GB News reports.
Millions of vaccine doses purchased by EU countries when they became widely available in 2021 have reportedly been wasted. The bloc’s countries received 1.5 billion vaccines – that is more than three for every European.
Some 215 million vaccines were scrapped, costing taxpayers €4 billion, according to an analysis by Politico. The analysis is based only on data from 19 European countries, so the total amount of waste could be much higher – perhaps as high as 312 million destroyed vaccines.
Germany had the highest number of vaccines discarded, with 83 million discarded doses. In second place was Italy, where more than 49 million vaccines were discarded. According to the findings, some major governments, such as France, did not want to provide data, while four of the 19 countries were reported by local media.
One of the reasons so many vaccines have been scrapped is the obsolescence of older vaccine strains.
The analysis comes against a backdrop of new polling showing that a fifth of the British public would support the return of Covid measures. The survey, conducted by campaign group More In Common, polled 2,033 people between 30 November and 4 December and asked them whether they would support the introduction of Covid measures in some form.
The question asked was:
“Currently, there are no legal Covid-19 restrictions in place in the UK. Thinking of the current health situation in the UK, would you support or oppose the Government re-introducing each of the following Covid-19 restrictions at the current time?”
Millennials (people aged 25-40) are strongly in favour of restrictions, with a third in favour of closing nightclubs and three in ten in favour of introducing a rule of six.
Members of the ‘silent generation’ (those aged 75 and over) are the least supportive of restrictions on meeting in groups of more than six – just 18 per cent – while 78 are opposed. More in Common UK director Luke Tryl said:
“Support for bringing back restrictions is highest among our Loyal National segment – the group that is the closest to matching Red Wall voters. 4 in 10 back closing night clubs, nearly six in 10 want mandatory masks back. Worth saying, (and I think there is a mismatch that makes more engaged people find this hard to understand), Do qual on this and you find is a sizeable minority group of people who quite liked lots of aspects of lockdown (not the pandemic itself, but the lifestyle). On the difference between revealed/stated preference on masks.”
