Health ministry denies claims of expired Covid-19 vaccines

Over 3 million Covid -19 vaccine doses have been administered in the last two weeks.

The Ministry of Health Saturday announced an increased uptake with a daily average vaccination rate of nearly 224,000 up from an average of 80,000 witnessed late last year.

As of today, 14.2 million persons above 18 years (more than half of the adult population) have received at least one dose and 6.9 million (25%) are now fully vaccinated.

Last week the health ministry partnered with the Ministry of Interior and National Coordination to enlist the support of chiefs and their assistants, to mobilize communities across the country.

“The support we have received from the chiefs has increased access to the elderly. Now 44.5% of persons above 58 years of age are fully vaccinated and we project this to rise to 50% by the end of next week, meaning that we shall soon have vaccinated and protected half of the population, which is mostly at risk of severe disease and death from COVID-19 infection” said Health CS Mutahi Kagwe in a statement.

Kagwe said the country had adequate doses to continue with the mass vaccination campaign that targets at least 30 million doses by end of June.

Expired doses

The Ministry at the same time refuted reports that 10 million doses of vaccines are lying in the stores while others were about to expire.

“We wish to clarify as follows. 7 million of these doses have already been distributed to the counties and are currently being used in the ongoing mass vaccination campaign including out-reaches. Only 2.9 million doses are still available in our Central vaccines stores in Kitengela” he said.

“ Majority of these doses (2.3 million doses) are Johnson and Johnson which have a long self-life and therefore not at risk of expiry.  All doses of AstraZeneca with short expiry have been distributed for use on the ongoing campaign” he added.

He said the delivery of 4 million more doses was scheduled before the end of this month.

“There should be no reason why any Kenyan should not receive their vaccination and be protected from this ongoing pandemic”.

As of February 11th 2022, a total of 15,030,753 vaccines have been administered across the country.

Of these, 7,333,064 are partially vaccinated while those fully vaccinated are 6,866,516.

Another 610,792 are doses administered to those between 15 to 17 years while 220,381 are booster doses.

The total number of vaccines administered in the last 24 hours is 240,152 while the total number of people fully vaccinated in the last 24 hours is 96,950.

The uptake of the second dose among those who received their first dose was at 63.3%.

The proportion of adults fully vaccinated was 25.2%. The Government is working towards vaccinating a targeted population of 27,246,033.