ABUJA (CU)_In mid-May this year, the UN Security Council issued a presidential statement which revealed that the African continent, which made up around 20 per cent of the world’s need for COVID vaccines, had so far received only 2 per cent of the jabs produced globally. Fortunately, in the same month, during the Summit on Financing African economies hosted by Paris, a pledge was made to lift patents that would enable Africa produce its own vaccines. According to many leaders from the region, one of the main challenges is to counter efforts that have sought to demonize vaccination, which is widespread among African people mainly due to the fact the vaccines come from elsewhere. This is an issue which can be addressed by domestic manufacturing of the jabs.
Accordingly, as the biggest economy in the region, Nigeria has decided to focus on the production of COVID vaccines domestically in order to cater to the shortage in the country. Speaking during a virtual conference on ‘Nigeria and the Next Pandemic: preparedness, response and vaccines’, Nigeria’s Minister of State for Health, Olorunnimbe Mamora, noted that the country’s own manufacturing hub will be crucial in addressing the inequitable distribution of vaccines at the moment.
“As many are aware, the world is facing inequitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, with Africa bearing the brunt of it. While countries in Europe and America are fully vaccinated as high as 50 percent of their population in less than one year, African countries are still around one per cent and faced with a scarcity of vaccines,” the minister said. “We can only hope to get over that or we have our own manufacturing hub in Nigeria and that is what we are working towards achieving,” he added.
According to the Health Minister, a joint venture between the Nigerian government and a private organisation, by the name of Bio-Vaccine Nigeria Limited, has already begun working on manufacturing vaccines for the West African nation.
Moreover, Mamora also pointed to the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, and emphasised the need to be prepared for future health crises. “We were not as prepared as we would have loved to at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the resources we had were based on previous investment in health security by NCDC,” he said. “We are seeking this opportunity, this moment of disruption, to build more sustainable and resilient systems for health security in Nigeria.”
The minister noted that while it is difficult to prepare for future pandemics while facing one at the moment, however, the WHO projects the world to be facing the threat of a pandemic every five years which provides sufficient reason to prepare. Accordingly, the manufacturing of vaccines domestically is one of the key areas in this process, Mamora noted.
