By Asmau Ahmad
The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has announced the approval of the Pfizer-BionTech COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use in Nigeria.
Director-General of the agency, Professor Mojisola Adeyeye, made the announcement during a press briefing at the agency’s headquarters on Friday.
According to her, the approval given was not a full one but it would be in effect within the period of getting people vaccinated and gathering data about the adverse effects following immunisation.
The NAFDAC boss also revealed that the agency relied on a more mature regulatory body for its approval, adding that that the agency was at liberty to review its stance since the World Health Organisation (WHO) had given emergency use listing.
“The purpose of the press briefing is to announce that NAFDAC has just approved Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines for possible use in Nigeria. They were reviewed carefully by the NAFDAC staff COVID-19 vaccine committee to make sure that the science behind the development is well understood and in accord with our world regulatory activities.
“We used different mechanisms to approve the vaccine. We used reliance, meaning that a more mature regulatory agency across the globe, we can use that as a basis for our review.
“We will get the assessment report, know the peculiarity there, then our COVID-19 committee will get to do their job,” Prof Adeyeye said
Health Reporters had earlier reported that NAFDAC had approved the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine for use in Nigeria.
The country commenced its vaccination programme against the novel coronavirus last month with 3.924m doses of AstraZeneca vaccine doses.
According to the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), over one million doses of the vaccine have so far been administered across the country in the first phase of the vaccination programme.
Also, over 160,000 COVID-19 infections and more than 2000 associated deaths have been recorded in the country in the last one year, according to statistics from the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control.
