The Federal Government said it had delivered Moderna vaccines to 29 states as part of efforts to kick-start the second phase of COVID-19 vaccination in the country,
The Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), Dr Faisal Shuaib, disclosed this yesterday at a joint briefing on COVID-19 vaccination by his agency, the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), and the World Health Organization (WHO).
He, however, revealed that eight states are yet to receive the vaccines because they lacked requisite storage capacity, especially backup cold chain facilities.
Dr Shuaib further informed that the second dose vaccination with AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine began yesterday, – August 25, to end on September 5.
According to him, in the past few days, their focus has been on distributing the range of COVID-19 vaccines – Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca to the states, as well as concluding the training of state and LGA personnel to ensure optimum vaccine utilization.
He explained that they could not deploy the vaccines immediately after NAFDAC certification because, unlike AstraZeneca, the Moderna vaccine did not come with complete barcoding, which absolutely needed to enable them to track and trace the vaccines.
Dr Shuai also hinted that Nigeria was the first country to use Track and Trace to monitor the movement and utilization of the vaccine, adding that the remaining eight states that have not deployed the vaccines have not demonstrated readiness in terms of their cold chain capacity.
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