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Nigeria had to destroy over 1 million donated AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine doses Wednesday because they were brought over too close to their expiration date.
Dr. Faisal Shuaib, director of Nigeria's National Primary Health Care Development Agency, said the country did not have much choice after rich western countries donated doses with such a short window of time to administer them.
According to Al Jazeera, Shuaib said he originally felt like he needed to take the doses due to vaccine shortages across Africa, even knowing about their limited shelf life.
"We had developed countries that procured these vaccines and hoarded them," Shuaib said. "At the point they were about to expire, they offered them for donation."
Last week, he said Nigeria would stop taking donations like these, though officials have yet to decide the cutoff for what would be considered too short a time before expiration.
The AstraZeneca doses were destroyed at a dumpsite in the capital of Abuja. The vaccines were packed into cardboard boxes and plastic, then crushed by a bulldozer.
The destruction of the doses was meant to assure the Nigerian public that health officials will not cut any corners when giving vaccine doses. They will not risk giving people ineffective doses in a country where only about 2 percent of its population of 206 million is fully vaccinated.
Al Jazeera's Fidelis Mbah added that this public display was also an attempt to dissuade Nigerians from questioning the vaccine's effectiveness, as many conspiracy theories about the vaccine have spread across the country.
Vaccine hesitancy remains high, but the government still holds out hope it can reach its goal of getting a quarter of the population vaccinated by February. Just this week, the vaccination rate is almost twice as high as before.
Nigeria has been seeing a spike in confirmed infections since it detected the highly-infectious Omicron variant in late November, recording a 500 percent increase in cases over the past two weeks, according to the Nigeria Center for Disease Control.
The 2,123 new COVID-19 infections it confirmed on Tuesday was the highest daily tally since last January and the second highest since the pandemic began.
"If we are going to overcome this COVID-19 pandemic, we have to do better job of ensuring better supply of the COVID-19 vaccines," said Shuaib. "No country will be able to eradicate COVID-19 ... until all countries are able to eradicate it."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
