Nigeria will receive at least 100,000 doses of the Pfizer and BioNTech approved COVID-19 vaccines by the end of January, the Executive Director of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), Faisal Shuaib, has said.
He made this known at the Presidential Task Force (PTF) briefing on COVID-19 on Tuesday.
According to him, a letter announcing this allocation in the first phase of the delivery of the vaccines is expected from the COVAX facility during the week.
He said, “In the first phase through the COVAX facility, we expect to receive approximately 100,000 doses of the Pfizer and bioNtech vaccine by the end of January.”
He explained that Nigeria was expecting free 42 million doses of vaccines in the second phase through the COVAX facility, an initiative run by the vaccine alliance, GAVI, to ensure equitable access to a COVID vaccine.
According to him, the second phase will be “a combination of all the available approved vaccines currently in the market,” although, this would cover only about 20 per cent of Nigeria’s over 200 million population.
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Shuaib said about 70 per cent of the total population needs to receive the COVID-19 vaccines to completely eradicate the virus.
He said only about 40 per cent will be vaccinated in 2021, while the remaining 30 per cent will be covered in 2022.
The NPHCDA boss said priority will be given to frontliine health workers, first responders, strategic country leadership and those that are elderly and with co-morbidities.
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