As Nigeria prepares to receive its first consignment of COVID-19 vaccines, two scientists have cautioned the Federal Government against a mass COVID-19 vaccination plan.
Recall that the Minister of Health, Dr. Osagie Ehanire, in December 2020 revealed that the Federal Government had planned to acquire vaccines worth N400 billion.
Ehanire had said that the N400 billion would be able to vaccinate 70 percent of Nigeria’s 200 million population.
Nigeria had 88,587 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 1,294 deaths as of yesterday. It was against this backdrop that the scientists called for caution in separate interviews with newsmen in Ibadan yesterday.
A professor of immunology, Ganiyu Arinola, said that rolling out a mass nationwide vaccine campaign might not be the best use of resources for a resource-poor country like Nigeria. Arinola, of the Department of Immunology, University of Ibadan, said that mass vaccination alone would not halt the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria, adding that the available vaccines do not confer lifelong immunity against the virus.
The immunologist further said that Nigeria should come up with its own strategies to end the pandemic by adopting its own unique method of fighting the virus.
In the same vein, a virologist at the College of Medicine, University of Ibadan, Dr Olubusuyi Adewumi, said that decisions on COVID-19 vaccination must be guided by scientific evidence.
Adewumi, who noted that the country had not been as hard-hit by the coronavirus pandemic as other countries, said that mass vaccination may not be the best strategy for Nigeria, adding that such monumental decisions must be well thought out and not based on misplaced sentiment.
