Business Insider, a website owned by Springer, has received information from a lower authority of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institute (PEI) that an additional 64.1 million “COVID-19 vaccine doses” were destroyed in 2024. This brings the total to almost 200 million doses, mostly purchased by the government with taxpayers’ money during the “COVID-19 crisis.” The estimated value of the destroyed stock in 2024 is around €150 million.
The “Center for Pandemic Vaccines and Therapeutics” which is part of the PEI, a federal authority under the Ministry of Health, responded to a Business Insider inquiry about current stock levels of “COVID-19 vaccines.”
According to the response, “an additional 64.1 million COVID-19 vaccine doses were destroyed in 2024.” This increases the total number of destroyed doses to almost 200 million, following the 132 million doses reportedly disposed of last year.
In January, a statement on the Bundestag’s website read:
“By early December 2023, the federal government still had 52.3 million doses of non-Omicron XBB.1.5 adapted vaccines, including 50.7 million Comirnaty (Biontech/Pfizer) and 1.6 million Spikevax (Moderna) doses. In the past year, a total of around 132 million doses of vaccines from various manufacturers that were not adapted to the Omicron XBB.1.5 subvariant were disposed of.”
The reason for the destruction, according to the Business Insider article, was “for example, the expiration date being reached.” A spokesperson for the Center also mentioned that the cost of disposing of “expired COVID-19 vaccine doses” from 2022 to the present is around €145,000.
Totaling the costs of the purchased vaccines, the government spent over €13 billion, as reported by the ARD Tagesschau in January last year.
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen negotiated contracts with the pharmaceutical industry under unknown conditions, and the prices of the vaccines have only been leaked in fragments so far.
According to Business Insider calculations, based on Tagesschau information and a low purchase price of €2.30 per dose, the 64.1 million destroyed doses in 2024 had a value of around €150 million alone.
In response to an inquiry from the AfD parliamentary group in 2022, the Ministry of Health revealed that Germany had ordered around 554 million doses from the European Commission’s initiative, including Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, CureVac, Sanofi/GSK, Valneva, and Novavax, by the end of 2021.
To recall, nearly 200 million doses from various manufacturers have been destroyed in the last two years, with the associated costs of purchase, transport, storage, and disposal borne by the taxpayer.
A legal investigation, including clarifying open questions and questioning responsible politicians, has not yet been conducted. Instead, the current Health Minister, Karl Lauterbach (SPD), announced in August 2024 that he has ordered an additional 15 million doses for “COVID-19 booster shots.”
He told the Funke Mediengruppe newspapers, “We will see a lot of infections this fall and winter again.