Nigeria is to take delivery of its first batch of COVID-19 vaccines, according to reports.
Chairman of the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on the pandemic and Secretary to Government of the Federation (SGF) said this in Abuja. According to him, the country’s free allocation of 4 million doses of the COVAX vaccine will arrive on Tuesday from India.
He made the disclosure while speaking to journalists in Abuja: “Well, I can assure you that the vaccines are coming. And they are coming very quickly, barring any change in the delivery plan that has been released to us by UNICEF, they should arrive on Tuesday.
“Like I said, baring any change because the logistical arrangements and other things are in the hands of the UNICEF, we believe that vaccines should depart India on the 1st of March 2021 10:30pm in the night and arrive Abuja on the second of March 2021, at about 11am in the morning.
“So, we are making preparation for that. But the truth about it is that as we received the vaccines, this one is coming from the corporate facility. About 4 million doses of vaccines are coming from the corporate facility on this one tree. We’re supposed to have about 16 million in the first quarter from the COVAX facility. By the time they supply all the range, we expect that they will supply about 84 million doses from the COVID facility which is free of charge, and is supposed to cover about 20% of the Nigerian population.
“We also have another source of vaccines coming in from the African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team (AVATT) facility. We expect about 41 million of that, a combination of AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.
“Everything we are expecting from the COVAX facility, I believe is going to be the AstraZeneca which has a good range in terms of storage for us because it uses just plus two, two plus 8% of refrigeration. It doesn’t come with a new complication.
“We already have that cold chain available in virtually all the local governments or constituency and wards in this country. I believe we are well prepared to receive our vaccines. And I hope that they keep to this timeframe that they have given us and we are eagerly expecting vaccines.”
The SGF reiterated the need for Nigerians not to jettisoned the non-pharmaceutical interventions put in place by the PTF, saying: “But I must caution Nigerians that it is going to be a combination of vaccines with the non pharmaceutical measures and the non pharmaceutical measures will remain in place, the wearing of masks the keeping of social distancing, the need for personal hygiene and taking responsibility to ensure that we do not congregate in large gatherings and avoid travels if it is not necessary.”
It should be recalled that, the World Health Organization (WHO) refuted a report that it denied Nigeria and several African countries from access to COVID-19 Vaccines.
WHO Country Representative in Nigeria Dr Walter Kazadi Mulombo gave the clarification at a joint press conference of the WHO and the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) held in Abuja on the purported disqualification of Nigeria from access to COVID 19 vaccines.
The denial was on the heel of insinuation that WHO had denied Nigeria access to the vaccines through the COVAX facility because of concern about lack of electricity for storage and logistics for distribution of the vaccines across the nation.
The report credited to WHO African Region Director, Dr Matshidiso Moeti, had claimed that only four countries- Cape Verde, South Africa, Tunisia and Rwanda had been allocated with around 320,000 doses of Pfizer BioNTech vaccines because they were the only countries with the facilities to store and distribute doses at minus 70 degrees Celsius.
However, Dr Mulombo insisted that WHO had not disqualified any country in Africa from accessing COVID-19 vaccines through the COVAX facility, but rather supporting all countries to access vaccines as quickly as possible.
The WHO country representative said all African countries were expected to start accessing the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccines as soon as possible, adding the vaccine is under review by WHO for Emergency Use Listing and the outcome is expected soon.
He stressed that Nigeria had received by far the largest allocation, with 16 million doses of the 88 million AstraZeneca doses allocated to African countries for the first phase, adding aside Astra Zeneca doses, there is an initial limited volume of Pfizer vaccine available through COVAX.
“Demand for the initial allocation of 1.2 million Pfizer doses was exceptionally high. COVAX received interest from 72 countries around the world, of which 51 countries were considered by the review committee as “ready” (Nigeria was among these countries) and 18 countries in total were finally chosen to receive initial Pfizer doses.
“On the Africa continent, as of the 18 January deadline, COVAX received 13 submissions and a multi-agency committee evaluated the proposals of which nine were recommended as ready to deploy the Pfizer vaccine including Nigeria.
“Unfortunately, it was not feasible to provide each of these 51 countries with Pfizer doses at the time, due to a number of factors including the limited capacity for Pfizer to handle many countries at once. Therefore, spreading the limited doses across all the 51 countries deemed ‘ready’ could not have Achieved the intended public health benefit,” Mulombo said.
He disclosed that after epidemiological data was taken into account, the decision was taken to proportionally balance the number of self-financing and AMC participants, as well as participants across all six WHO regions