FG Gives Reasons Nigeria Cannot Produce COVID-19 Vaccines

The Executive Director of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), Faisal Shuaib, has said Nigeria cannot produce COVID-19 vaccines because the process of producing them requires massive investment that has not been done for decades.

Naija News reports that Shuaib stated this while speaking at the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19 briefing on Monday.

He said: “There are questions around why Nigeria is not producing COVID-19 vaccines. I want to put on record that the process of producing a vaccine is very complex and complicated. It requires massive investment that has not been done for many decades.”

“In the 1960s, we use to make yellow fever vaccines in this country. In the 90s, we decided to change analogue ways of making yellow fever vaccines to more recent technologies.

“However, that transfer of technology never happened and that is why we did not continue to make vaccines,” Mr Shuaib said.

Nigeria is expected to receive 100,000 doses of the Pfizer and bioNtech vaccine by the end of January, with administration beginning immediately.

Nigeria’s Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) on Monday has confirmed one thousand two hundred and forty-four news cases of COVID-19 disease in Nigeria.

The newly reported cases of the novel virus were recorded from 18 states of the federation, Naija News understands.

NCDC in a post on its official Twitter account on Monday night, January 11, 2021, confirmed COVID-19 death cases to have risen to 1,361 in Nigeria with a total of 80,491 people already discharged.