The Federal Government has announced that it expects to receive about 8 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines, including donations from the United States government by the end of next month.
This follows the exhaustion of the initial supply of close to 4 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines last week in its ongoing vaccination exercise.
This disclosure was made by the Executive Director/Chief Executive Officer of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), Faisal Shuaib, on Wednesday, July 14, 2021, during a press briefing in Abuja.
Shuaib said that Nigeria hopes to resume vaccinations within the next couple of weeks when the new doses arrive in the country.
He urged Nigerians to abide by “non-pharmaceutical” measures, such as mask-wearing and social distancing, to stem the spread of the virus until fresh doses arrived.
The NPHCDA boss explained that Nigeria expects delivery of 3.924 million doses of Oxford/AstraZeneca shots from global vaccine-sharing scheme COVAX by the end of July or early August and an additional 3.93 million doses of either Pfizer/Biotech or Moderna, donated by the U.S. government via COVAX, in August as well.
He revealed that Nigeria is expecting another 3.577 million doses of Pfizer/Biotech or Moderna from COVAX in the third quarter of 2021, as well as 29.85 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine which was purchased through the Africa Union, although no specific date of arrival was given.
It can be recalled that Nigeria in March 2021, received its first supply of about 3.92 million doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines under the COVAX initiative, which only covered a small fraction of its 200 million population.
The Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, has raised an alarm over a possible outbreak of the third wave of the coronavirus pandemic in the country following a recent increase in the number of cases.
This is coming some days after the Federal Government announced the detection of the dreaded Delta variant in an international passenger.
Also, the United States Government had last month outlined a plan to share 55 million U.S. COVID-19 vaccine doses globally via COVAX.
-Nairametric
