By GRACE AUDU, Abuja –
Nigeria’s Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Boss Mustapha, said yesterday that the country would receive the first tranche of COVID-19 vaccines on March 2, 2021.
Speaking in Abuja during an evaluation of Nigeria’s fight against the coronavirus pandemic, Boss Mustapha, who also chairs the country’s Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19, said: “They (vaccines) should depart India on March 1, 2021 in the night and arrive in Abuja on the 2nd of March, 2021.”
According to him, “Nigeria is set to receive its first four million shipment of COVID-19 vaccines from COVAX, a global scheme set up to procure and distribute vaccines for free, as the world races to contain the coronavirus pandemic.”
COVAX, which was set up in April 2020 to help ensure a fairer distribution of coronavirus vaccines between the rich and poor nations, said it would deliver two billion doses to member-states by the end of 2021.
Nigeria’s four million vaccines would be its first COVID-19 vaccines from the COVAX facility.
The facility promised access to vaccines for up to 20 percent of participating countries’ population with an initial supply beginning in the first quarter of 2021 to inoculate three per cent of their populations.
The Nigerian government had earlier announced that the first four million doses of the vaccines would arrive in the country by the end of February.
The SGF disclosed that the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) would be organising the shipment from Mumbai, India, with the World Health Organisation (WHO), both backers of COVAX.
Meanwhile, the PTF chairman praised Nigeria’s health workers and the various frontline workers for working hard to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
Mustapha, while evaluating the county’s response to COVID-19 in the past year, said the PTF had performed “very well’’ with a very robust national response.
“We have succeeded in discharging our mandate of managing the pandemic with a well-defined process and a robust national response,” he noted.
The SGF said that the strategies evolved by his committee to manage the pandemic had been replicated in some other countries, especially the compulsory Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) testing for travellers.
He explained that the pandemic had helped the country to scale up its health infrastructure, citing the increase in the number of infectious diseases testing laboratories from four to 132 across the country.