Israeli authorities are grappling with a surplus of COVID-19 vaccines, and have started talks with AstraZeneca's over the rerouting of the doses purchased to other countries, national coronavirus commissioner Professor Nachman Ash said Wednesday.
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"We are trying to find the best solution. After all, we don't want the doses to arrive only to have them get thrown out right away," Ash told Army Radio.
He said that with Israel having secured enough doses through 2022 with other manufacturers, it no longer needed the 10 million doses from AstraZeneca.
"They can certainly be used in other places in the world. At the moment, we are trying to find, along with the company, the best way to do this," he said.
In his remarks, Ash made no reference to the suspected linkage between the AstraZeneca vaccine and rare cases of blood clots in some of its recipients in Europe. Many countries there resumed administering it after the European Union's drug watchdog said benefits outweighed risks.
Israel cast a wide net last year when it tried to secure vaccine doses at the height of the pandemic and pre-ordered from multiple vaccine producers, and chiefly from Pfizer/BioNTech, launching one of the world's swiftest rollouts.
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