World Health Organization says Nigeria and other Africa countries have not been disqualified from accessing coronavirus vaccine.WHO Country Representative, Walter Mulomboo, in an official statement on Saturday, said no African country was barred for getting the vaccine.
He added that the United Nations is facilitating quick access to the vaccine via COVAX facility.
According to him, all countries across the continent would start accessing the vaccines by the end of February.
In a breakdown, WHO said of the 88 million AstraZeneca doses allocated to African countries for the first phase, Nigeria has received the largest allocation of 16 million doses.He said, “COVAX received interest from 72 countries around the world, of which 51 countries were considered by the review committee as “ready” (Nigeria was among these countries) and 18 countries in total were finally chosen to receive initial Pfizer doses.
“On the Africa continent, as of the 18 January deadline, COVAX received 13 submissions and a multi-agency committee evaluated the proposals of which 9 were recommended as ready to deploy the Pfizer vaccine including Nigeria.”
The WHO country representative said unfortunately, it was not feasible to provide all 51 nations with Pfizer doses, due to a number of factors, including the limited capacity for Pfizer to handle many countries at once.”
Mulomboo also explained that “After epidemiological data was taken into account, the decision was taken to proportionally balance the number of self-financing and AMC Participants, as well as participants across all WHO regions”.