Director-General of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, yesterday, stated that her organisation was working with international partners to ensure Nigeria gets vaccines with long expiration dates.
She was reacting to the one million doses of vaccines that expired in November and destroyed by NAFDAC and the National Primary Health Care Development Agency and the Abuja Environmental Protection Agency in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that 1,066,214 doses of expired AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines were destroyed at the Gosa dumping site in Abuja.
Adeyeye disclosed, yesterday, in Lagos, that the expired therapies had very short expiration dates, helped by logistical challenge.
This is even as the World Health Organisation (WHO), yesterday, said the risk posed by the Omicron variant was still “very high.”
The submission came in the wake of the 11 per cent upsurge in infections globally last week.
“Omicron is behind the rapid virus spikes,” WHO said in its COVID weekly epidemiological update yesterday, having overtaken the previously-dominant Delta variant in several nations, including the United Kingdom and the United States.”
The rapid circulation of the Delta and Omicron variants of COVID-19 worldwide is creating a ‘tsunami of cases,’ WHO Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said.
Addressing a news briefing, he also repeated his call for countries to share vaccines more equitably and warned that the emphasis on delivering booster jabs in richer countries could leave poorer nations short of shots.
The WHO chief said hitting a 70 percent global vaccination target could help bring about an end to the acute phase of the pandemic.
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