The federal government has received the donation of 859,600 doses of AstraZeneca Covid-19 Vaccine and 175 Solar Direct Drive (SSD) refrigerators from the government of Japan.
Speaking during the official handing over of the donations Wednesday in Abuja, the executive director of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), Dr Faisal Shuaib, thank the Government of Japan for the generous donation, saying it will certainly go a long way in ensuring Nigerians are protected and also address vaccine storage challenges at the health facility level as well as improving accessibility to AstraZeneca in the country.
“We are particularly happy about the Solar Direct Drive (SDD) Refrigerators because of their advantages in independent and uninterrupted power source for vaccine storage. We have since deployed the SDDs to 24 states of the federation based on vaccine coverage, equity and making sure we reach the last mile,” he said.
Shuaib noted that in Nigeria, it is beyond a fight against COVID-19 but actually a battle against the pandemic, citing the unique synergy of vaccine hesitancy, disinformation and a huge population of eligible persons.
He, however, said that the country has continued to push through these odds, and has successfully vaccinated 17,914,944 eligible persons with the first dose, representing 16 per cent of the eligible population targeted for vaccination in the country.
The Japanese Ambassadors to Nigeria,
Matsunaga Kazuyoshi, said the donation was to support the fight against COVID-19, adding that it was the third Japanese vaccine to enter sub Saharan Africa.
Kazuyoshi noted that storage of vaccines was also a problem in Nigeria hence the supply of refrigerators to help the proper storage system for vaccines.
He also said that the gesture would boost the bilateral relationship between Nigeria and Japan.
In his remarks, the World Health Organisation (WHO) representative to Nigeria, Dr. Walter Mulombo,
congratulated the NPHCDA over the scale up of vaccination to 200,000 doses daily to keep it up to reach the target of 70 cant of its population by June.
