The Federal Government has disclosed that the country would stick with only four vaccines for its Covid-19 response.
The government, through the Executive Director of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), Dr. Faisal Shuaib, said that Nigeria was prioritising the AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.
Shuaib, who spoke in Abuja, said that even though the Sinopharm vaccine had been approved by the national medicines regulator “for emergency use”, rolling it out was not a priority.
“We don’t want a situation where we may have 10 or 20 vaccines that have been globally recognised or listed for emergency use, and then you want to take all 20 vaccines to Nigeria, it doesn’t make any sense. We’re prioritising those ones that we are already familiar with,” he stated.
Shuaib added that whether vaccines other than the four he had named will be used in Nigeria at a later stage would depend on availability and “how this pandemic shapes up”.
At a briefing a week earlier, Shuaib had said Nigeria was expecting to take delivery of 7.7million doses of the Sinopharm vaccine through the COVAX scheme aimed at providing vaccines to developing countries.
However, he had not made clear whether the Sinopharm doses would be administered or not.
So far, 2.9million people in Nigeria have received one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, while 1.4 million people have received two doses.
Nigeria’s population is estimated at 200million.
The main constraints are a lack of supply and high levels of vaccine hesitancy among parts of the population.
Shuaib said Nigeria had taken delivery last week of close to 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca (AZN.L) vaccine supplied by Britain through the COVAX scheme, the latest out of a series of donations from developed countries.
Nigeria is also expecting deliveries over coming months of tens of millions of doses of the Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) vaccine which it has purchased through an African Union programme.