ABUJA - Nigeria will require civil servants to show proof of vaccination against COVID-19 or a negative test for the disease to gain access to their offices from the beginning of December, a presidential committee said on Wednesday.
The presidential committee said unvaccinated governmentworkers will need to present a negative test result done within72-hours before they are granted access to their offices acrossthe country and its embassies abroad.
"An appropriate service wide advisory/circular will beissued to guide the process," Boss Mustapha, chairman of thepresidential steering committee on COVID-19, said in astatement.
Nigeria has administered some five million vaccine doses toits 200 million citizens, and is in the midst of deployingmillions more doses of Moderna and AstraZenecashots received through the COVAX vaccine scheme for developingcountries.
It also has 1.12 million doses of the Johnson & Johnsonvaccine that it purchased through an African Unionprogramme and is scheduled to receive 7.7 million doses of theSinopharm vaccine via COVAX.
Nigeria, which has not tested widely for COVID-19, has sofar recorded 208,153 confirmed infections and 2,756 deaths fromthe virus.
In May, Nigeria banned travellers coming from some countrieswhere COVID-19 was spreading rapidly.
The presidential committee said it had decided to removeSouth Africa, Turkey and Brazil from its restricted travel listfollowing a review of developments in those countries.