We Have More Covid-19 Vaccines in Nigeria - Time to Deliver

After the successful deployment of the first round of vaccines received from the COVAX facility in March 2021, Nigeria has received its second batch of vaccines from countries around the world; receiving 4 million doses of the Moderna vaccine from the United States through the COVAX facility and 177,600 doses of the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, purchased by the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust (AVAT), an initiative of African Union member states to pool their purchasing power to procure vaccines.

The United Kingdom has donated 1,292,640 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine as well as safety boxes and syringes, ensuring that the country has the medical consumables necessary to administer the vaccines safely. The inflow of vaccines has prompted the flag-off of the second phase of the vaccination campaign and it is important to explore how to deploy these vaccines effectively, taking into consideration the lessons learnt from the first rollout.

So far in terms of the vaccination uptake, Nigeria has been playing catch up as to date, the country has only vaccinated 1.3% of its population partially and fully against the global vaccination rate of 39.5% of people partially and fully vaccinated. This falls short of the 40% that the country aimed to vaccinate by the end of 2021. This poses a risk to Nigeria's vaccine efforts because if demand shifts towards booster shots, it has the potential to affect vaccine supply as production capacity will be put under further pressure, affecting the number of vaccine doses that Nigeria can access. Booster shots are additional doses of vaccines that are given either to increase immunity or to fight against a new variant, writes Kenni Ndili for Nigeria Health Watch.

According to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, the country has recorded at least 193,013 confirmed Covid-19 cases, 179,00 recoveries, and over 2,480 fatalities.