Austria has ordered 57 million vaccine doses since the beginning of the pandemic
From the beginning of the pandemic until the beginning of December 2021, Austria has ordered a total of 57 million corona vaccine doses. During this period, 23.9 million doses were delivered by Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca Johnson&Johnson, who and four companies billed the Republic 246 million euros for this by the end of October last year, according to an inquiry by Health Minister Wolfgang Mückstein ( green) out.
With its parliamentary question, the FPÖ also wanted to find out how many vaccines had to be disposed of “as a result of the population’s unexpected willingness to vaccinate”. “As of January 5th, 2022, a total of 283,140 doses (vector vaccines) that were at the disposal of the federal government have expired,” said the Minister of Health.
For Johnson&Johnson, Mückstein listed only 50 expired units. Most of the very first vaccine, that of the company AstraZeneca, which soon became the subject of much talk due to vaccination side effects and was no longer vaccinated in Austria from early summer 2021, is “left over”: with the expiry date of August 31, 2021, there were only 20 expired units , with an expiry date of December 31st, however, 280,460 expired cans are listed.
The order numbers in detail: The following orders were placed by December 9, 2021: Pfizer/BioNTech 33.3 million doses, Moderna eight million doses, AstraZeneca 5.9 million doses, Johnson&Johnson 4.5 million doses, Novavax 1.1 million doses, Valneva 1.2 million doses and Sanofi three million doses. So far, the following quantities have been delivered: Pfizer/BioNTech 14.8 million cans, Moderna 2.9 million cans, AstraZeneca 4.9 million cans and Johnson&Johnson 1.3 million cans, with around 990,000 cans being donated directly to J&J went to the Covax vaccine distribution initiative and never made it to Austria.
The further orders would only be “very volatile” due to the emergence of new Covid variants with uncertain consequences, the answer said. Adjustments both upwards and downwards are conceivable. Around 9.8 million cans are currently planned for the first quarter of 2022, 11.3 million cans in the second and 6.58 million units in the third quarter and 5.8 million in the fourth quarter. In total and according to the current status, that makes 33.55 million vaccine doses against Covid-19 for this year.
“In total, the Austrian federal government has done business with the vaccination industry in the amount of more than half a billion euros so far,” calculates FPÖ federal party chairman Herbert Kickl in a broadcast on Thursday. “And with the purchase of a further 33 million vaccine doses planned for this year, there will be more than 300 million euros,” he referred to “a billion dollar business”.