Sixty-six percent of Nigerians who have taken the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine are frontline workers, the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPCDA) has revealed.
Executive director Dr. Faisal Shuaib told a news conference in the capital Abuja that 73,465 Nigerians had received their second dose of the vaccine across the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), daily newspaper Blueprint reported on Wednesday.
“This includes President Muhammadu Buhari and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, who both received their second dose on Saturday,” it quoted Shuaib as saying.
“Similarly, you would have seen that in many states , the governors, members of the legislature, traditional and religious leaders have publicly started taking the second dose of their vaccinations.”
The Nation newspaper reported on Wednesday that the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked Nigeria’s coronavirus vaccine rollout as the best in Africa in terms of the storage and utilisation of the drugs.
It quoted WHO country representative Dr. Kazadi Mulombo as saying more than 1.8 billion vaccines were being distributed globally, mostly in 10 countries.
“Africa is lagging behind, but even though Africa is lagging behind, Nigeria is among the countries that are distributing the most Covid-19 vaccine as we speak. In terms of volume, we are still a long way to go because we plan to vaccinate more than 100 million of our population,” Mulombo said.
“On the African continent, many countries are now looking at Nigeria to learn how to better roll out vaccination programmes. WHO has challenged all the member states to ensure that by September, we vaccinate at least 10 percent of our population."
In its latest update the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control reported 166,534 cases of Covid-19 to date in the vastly-populated West African country. Of these, there have been 159,935 recoveries, but 2,099 people have died.
African News Agency (ANA)