Iowa has started tossing out tens of thousands of expiring COVID vaccine doses as demand for the shots continues to sag.
The state has discarded 81,186 doses of the vaccine so far, said Sarah Ekstrand, spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Public Health. That includes doses that expired, plus some that were wasted for other reasons, such as when a multiple-dose vial was opened and couldn’t be used up quickly enough.
Ekstrand said Monday that federal officials said states could not return unused vaccines to the manufacturers or donate them to other states or countries. “We have exhausted all options prior to vaccine expiring,” she said in an email to the Des Moines Register.
The department warned last month that the state might have to discard about 217,000 doses of vaccine by the end of August unless demand picked up. Ekstrand said Monday that about 30,000 of those doses are Johnson & Johnson shots, whose expiration dates have been bumped back to mid-September by federal regulators.
Nationwide, millions of doses are at risk of expiring.
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The Most Revolutionary Act 
Good, trash it all.
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It’s the kind of article that does your heart good, doesn’t it, William?
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They can’t even git it away! Love it.
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I suspect the number of vaccine hesitants is growing, Mary Anne.
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I wonder if the expired ones are safe and a way to say you are vaccinated without being vaccinated? I know they should be safer because there would be less mRNA.
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I’ve read commentary that some of the mRNA vaccines don’t actually deliver mRNA because it becomes unstable due to improper handling. There’s a possibility this is why some recipients have no reaction at all to the vaccine – not even soreness at the injection site.
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It would be great if the discarded products could be privately lab-tested to see what they contain. See whether there’s graphen oxide present. It might be that some of the vials are placebos to stagger the vaccination roll-out among a large group so as not to poison everyone at the same time, thereby deflecting suspicion.
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What an excellent idea, Weng. Hopefully someone will act on it.
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