Hong Kong may soon have to throw away millions of coronavirus vaccine doses because they are approaching their expiry date and not enough people have signed up for the jabs, an official warned.

Hong Kong is one of the few places in the world fortunate enough to have secured more than enough doses to innoculate its entire population of 7.5 million people, AFP reports.

But swirling distrust of the government as it stamps out dissent — combined with online misinformation and a lack of urgency in the comparatively virus-free city — has led to entrenched vaccine hesitancy and a dismal inoculation drive.

A member of the government's vaccine task force has warned that Hong Kongers “only have a three-month window” before the city's first batch of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines go out of date. “The vaccines all have expiry dates,” Thomas Tsang, a former controller of the Centre for Health Protection, told RTHK radio.