At least 215 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines purchased by EU countries at the height of the pandemic have since been thrown away at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of 4 billion euros, an analysis by POLITICO reveals, Report informs.

Since the first coronavirus vaccines were approved in late 2020, EU countries have collectively taken delivery of 1.5 billion doses (more than three for every person in Europe). Many of these now lie in landfills across the Continent.

Calculations based on available data show that EU countries have discarded an average of 0.7 jabs for every member of their population. Top of the scale is Estonia, which binned more than one dose per inhabitant, followed closely by Germany, which also threw away the largest raw volume of jabs.

Many of the vaccines in question were purchased at the height of the pandemic in 2021 when the EU, the US and the UK were all scrambling to secure a limited number of doses. It was during that frenzied time that the EU entered into its single biggest contract to purchase 1.1 billion doses from Pfizer and BioNTech.

It's easy to forget how uncertain things were in 2021, and the EU deal was lauded at the time. But both the size and the timing of the agreement turned out to be problematic. Countries were locked into buying doses even as the pandemic subsided, while efforts to donate excess jabs to third countries were thwarted by falling demand and logistics issues.