By Haruna Gimba
The Federal Government said Nigeria is set to receive its first four million shipments of COVID-19 vaccines on Tuesday from the COVAX facility.
Secretary to the Government of the Federation and Chairman of the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19, Mr Boss Mustapha disclosed to newsmen in Abuja while evaluating the country’s fight against the disease.
According to him, four million doses of the Oxford-Astrazeneca COVID-19 vaccine would depart India on Monday, March 1, 2021 in the night and arrive in Abuja on Tuesday March 2nd at about 11:10 am in the morning.
Health Reporters gathered that the Nigeria’s four million vaccines would be its first COVID-19 vaccines from the COVAX facility.
The SGF disclosed that the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) would be organising the shipment from Mumbai, India, with the World Health Organisation (WHO), both backers of COVAX.
Meanwhile, the PTF chairman praised Nigeria’s health workers and the various frontline workers for working hard to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
Mustapha, while evaluating the county’s response to COVID-19 in the past year, said the PTF had performed “very well with a very robust national response.
“We have succeeded in discharging our mandate of managing the pandemic with a well-defined process and a robust national response,” he stated.
The SGF said that the strategies evolved by his committee to manage the pandemic had been replicated in some other countries, especially the compulsory Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) testing for travelers.
He explained that the pandemic had helped the country to scale up its health infrastructure, citing the increase in the number of infectious diseases testing laboratories from four to 132 across the country.
Ghana received 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccines on Wednesday, making it the first country on the continent to benefit from the COVAX programme.
Cote d’Ivoire, a country with more than 32,000 COVID-19 cases and 188 deaths, also received over 500,000 doses of the Oxford-Astrazeneca COVID-19 vaccine on Friday.
It would be recall that one year ago, February 27, 2020; Nigeria detected its first case of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), and believed to be the first reported case in Sub-Saharan Africa.
With more than 150,000 cases reported since then, the NCDC said Nigeria’s response had been led by science and driven by the power of coordination, collaboration and solidarity among federal and state governments, partners, the private sector and the citizens.
The Nigerian government had earlier announced that the first four million doses of the vaccines would arrive in the country by the end of February.
