Oh come on.

First of all, vaccines aren't delivered internationally by ship, they are delivered by air cargo. Often by militaries, which will do it promptly at a moment's notice.

Second of all, "bureaucratic and safety concerns" is code for "we don't want to bother". Those are all things that can be worked around and have indeed been by other countries that had excess doses.

Using Louisiana from the article, 90% of the waste was from started vials that weren't finished before they expired from being initially punctured (starts a countdown for safety/effectiveness reasons). We could overnight those to airports in other countries and then, somehow, quickly transport them (while refrigerated) to remote areas. Yeah, that would totally show up with enough time to still be useful.

Or, hear me out, we could make sure other countries get doses straight from production sources instead of getting the just-about-to-expire doses left over from the US.

Louisiana has been throwing out doses for months now. At the outset, yes, this is acceptable, but when your waste is increasing month over month for six months+ you just start sending out less and you ship out the rest.

You also don't "overnight them to remote areas". You drop them off at the airport, then the other country either sends their military aviation or charters another countries cargos to pick them up.

> Louisiana has been throwing out doses for months now. At the outset, yes, this is acceptable, but when your waste is increasing month over month for six months+ you just start sending out less and you ship out the rest.

Ok, that's fair. But the rest of your comments in this discussion have been about how the waste itself is the result of a lie and that, somehow, we can collect already distributed and started vials quickly enough to fly them to other countries and, somehow, distribute quickly enough within them for it to be worthwhile and not just a hurried rush to find out that people are getting little better than a placebo.

If you'd read my second paragraph, I suggest exactly what you did: Make sure countries get doses from the sources instead of fretting about waste that, itself, is useless because there is no logistical scheme in place or even reasonably achievable that can collect and redistribute these doses to make them useful.

EDIT: Now I'm glad I quoted you as you've edited your comment after my initial reply.

> You also don't "overnight them to remote areas". You drop them off at the airport, then the other country either sends their military aviation or charters another countries cargos to pick them up.

Practically speaking, once the vials are started the countdown begins. The only reasonable way to use the started vials in countries on other continents and distribute to their remote communities is to ship it as fast as possible, which means overnighting. You can't collect them and wait a week to ship them and then a week or more to get them distributed within the countries and expect a useful vaccine dose to be delivered.

Also, you've misquoted me. I did not say "overnight them to remote areas" as you suggest. I said "overnight those to airports in other countries". Those are two very different statements. Don't make fake quotes in your replies, it's dishonest.

As I've said, you're not overnighting to other countries. Once you bring them to your local international airport they can take it from there. I didn't change what I said, I just clarified the wording.

You'll be surprised but generally plane flights take less than a week.

> As I've said, you're not overnighting to other countries. Once you bring them to your local international airport they can take it from there. I didn't change what I said, I just clarified the wording.

Ok so 224k wasted doses in Louisiana over around 6 months, 180 days. That's not even 2k doses per day, let's round up. There are probably more than 100 vaccination locations around Louisiana, so we're talking about no more than 20 doses per location being wasted (on average). Somehow, we're expected to totally reverse the distribution system every single night to collect at most 2k doses to take to an international airport and have, what, the other countries pay to have them shipped ASAP to their country. Let's say only 100 countries are sending aircraft, that's 20 doses that they're trying to get back to their people each day from Louisiana.

That's a totally reasonable approach, versus, say, getting them the initial batches instead.

> You'll be surprised but generally plane flights take less than a week.

Yes, but for 20 doses a day I doubt most countries would send or contract aircraft from Louisiana.

It reminds me of people yelling about food waste in grocery stores and restaurants.

Yes, absolutely it's bad they're throwing it out. No debate there. But it's not like they can ship it somewhere else without it costing more than the food itself.

The solution is better understanding of who needs what and try to fill them as close as you can without going over too much. That will optimize usage of a product.

I assure you there is no shortage of countries that will pay for the vaccines to be delivered by air to their airport and then take it from there.

Other countries have done it. The US won't. It's clearly not anywhere close.

It's not like it's one pharmacy throwing out millions in one place. They've all been distributed through a tree of supply chain. A million here, give 2,000 each to distributors to deliver, etc.

You essentially have to "undo" that chain faster than the product will go bad to a place it will be utilized in time.

Otherwise you'd have to travel to the majority of pharmacies all around the US and some how get that all to the airport.

And trucks/delivery drivers are very very expensive at scale.

You don't have to. You just reduce supply to expected levels of demands instead of throwing out millions of doses at an increasing rate. You don't need to roll back any further than the statewide distribution hubs.

> You just reduce supply to expected levels of demands instead of throwing out millions of doses at an increasing rate.

I imagine the effectiveness of anti-vax propaganda is tough to incorporate into distribution forecasts.

Other countries have not flown to hundreds of locations to pick up vaccines with hitherto unknown storage conditions.

The storage conditions are not unknown. There is documentation on every lot to guarantee that they were stored in the proper conditions and to evaluate how they should be stored going forwards.

There is also no reason to fly to these locations. There is already the logistic capacity to ship in the proper conditions between these locations and a few central hubs. It just has to be run in reverse. It hasn't been done for hundreds of locations because few countries are as big as the US, but it has been done on a smaller scale by less capable actors.

> There is already the logistic capacity to ship in the proper conditions between these locations and a few central hubs. It just has to be run in reverse.

You can't just duplicate existing routes. The logistics to collect unused vaccines from endpoints (on an insanely tight clock), would be enormously complex. We'd be setting that up on a nationwide scale, in the middle of a worldwide transportation shortage.

Further increasing exportable vaccine production would seem to be a more attainable goal.

I encourage you to consider an alternative perspective, in which grocery stores intentionally restrict availability of food in order to artificially maintain high profits and externalize the costs of reprocessing for redistribution: https://twitter.com/a_vansi/status/1445450534672998407

What if, for example, food that would spoil in a couple more days were simply moved to a "free" section of the grocery store? No need for complex shipping or logistics costs, simply ask the stocker to move from one aisle to another. Why don't grocery stores do that, if they're concerned about "reducing waste"?

There has also been a relatively small culture of dumpster diving (for food) because of it.

It's absolutely clickbait. The title strongly gives the impression of the US just throwing vaccines in the trash and laughing while others are suffering.

The article is much more levelheaded and explains why fairly well, so it's by definition clickbait IMO.

As against right wing media, which suffers no biases and is a paragon of objective impartiality.

Look, I'm a serial conservative voting Brit. I'm no leftie, but OMG Fox News and the Daily Mail take the biscuit. In the unlikely event I ever were to vote left, one of those is far more likely to push me over the edge than the Guardian.

Yeah, I don't let the "but he did it first" excuse fly with my kids, I'm certainly not letting it fly with the media.

That could be possible. Or, more likely:

The headline is actually correct, and the nuance in the article only serves to explain but on the balance does not justify the US throwing out doses. This is made a lot more likely by the fact that the US is the only country that refuses to export vaccines and by the fact that other countries have exported unused doses.

Something I have no knowledge of that the article could have mentioned precedent for is the expected waste observed in existing vaccination efforts. How much shrinkage due to the factors involved with "wasted" COVID vaccines is there with the flu vaccine which is not in a phase of initial scarcity? What is the prior and how different is the observation in this case?

News orgs bring issues to our attention. I can't think of a more important reason for them to exist.

The alt to reporting issues is "good news" reporting. We tried it for years and it was mostly vapid milquetoast. I was glad to see it go. I think follow-up stories to earlier issues works tho. Some of those will be positive.

note: The modern form of GNR is where the press parrots PR by biz/gov/leo - usually without any analysis.

Disagree. News orgs exist to inform of facts.

Positive facts allow us to double down on what works. Negative facts allow us to inspect what went wrong.

I think without some weight of newsworthiness, this synopsis is incomplete.

It's awesome that a pumpkin patch 2 counties away raised $52.40 but it doesn't serve me as well as learning my legislator passed laws that harm me - in trade for fat campaign donations.

I think it's better to view both independent left and ring wing media sources for balance and/or clarity but remain vigilant on said "editorial bias".

> Louisiana has thrown out 224,000 unused doses of the Covid vaccines – a rate that has almost tripled since the end of July, even as a deadly fourth wave of the virus gripped the state. Some of the lost doses came from opening and not finishing vials, but more than 20,000 shots simply expired.

So about 10% of the loss was due to expiration, and that could have happened pretty far downstream, not in some massive central warehouse where someone could have sent a pallet of 20000 shots out.

Vaccines are small enough and valuable enough to be transported in planes -- by the military if necessary.

IIRC they all have varying requirements for storage during transport; some require extreme temperature control while others do not.