Nicola Sturgeon admits Covid vaccine wastage in Scotland following rollout

Nicola Sturgeon addresses wastage of coronavirus vaccines

Nicola Sturgeon explained that there is an assumption up to five percent of the Covid vaccine could be wasted is the supply chain is disrupted. She went on to reveal that one percent of the vaccine in Scotland has been wasted. Speaking in Scottish Parliament, Jackie Baillie MSP asked: “Last week the Government published the COVID-19 deployment plan which allowed for five percent of Covid vaccines to be wasted.

“Can I ask the First Minister, can she tell us how many doses of vaccine have been wasted since rollout began?”

Ms Sturgeon replied: “There is an international standard on wasted assumptions on a programme of this scale.

“Five percent is a planning assumption; what it is there to do is just make sure we’re factoring in the possibility of some large scale breakdown in the supply chain.

“A big freezer might malfunction or something else happens that disrupts a siginficant supply.

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“There is not five percent wasted in practice.

“The wastage rate is around one percent and there are huge efforts to get that even lower.”

It comes as Ms Sturgeon said future generations will learn from the lessons that emerge regarding the Government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

The First Minister insisted that as Scotland and other countries remain in the grip of the “crisis”, her Government is focused for now on dealing with it.

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But she also stressed the importance of learning from what has happened in the 10 months since coronavirus arrived in Scotland last March.

The Scottish Government has come under fire over some of the decisions it has made – such as transferring elderly patients from hospital to care homes in the early part of the pandemic without first testing them for Covid.

“We’ve got things wrong, and I have tried never to shy away from this,” Ms Sturgeon said on Friday.

“Some of that will be relatively small things in the grand scheme of things, some of that might be bigger.”

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She said the Scottish Government had been “planning for something akin to a flu pandemic” when coronavirus first emerged, but she conceded it quickly became apparent that Covid “is very different to flu”.

Speaking at her regular coronavirus briefing, she said some of things the Scottish Government had got wrong “is a judgment with hindsight”.

She added: “If I knew then what I know now, there are some things I would have done differently. Perhaps testing in care homes being one of those.

“But I didn’t know then what I know now, and therefore if I was to turn the clock back I would do the same things because we were acting on what we knew then.”

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