The Executive Director, National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), Faisal Shuaib, has stated that the Sinopharm BBIBP-CorV COVID-19 vaccine has been granted approval for use in Nigeria.
The NPHCDA boss stated this at a media briefing in Abuja which took place on Tuesday
This comes weeks following the approval the Moderna and Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccines by NAFDAC for emergency use in Nigeria.
The Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine is an inactivated COVID-19 vaccine and had been approved by the World Health Organisation (WHO) for emergency use.
Shuaib noted that the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) had granted approval of the vaccine three days ago.
“NAFDAC has approved Sinopharm vaccine. The approval was done three days ago. And yes, Sinopharm vaccine has also received WHO certification,” he said.
“So, it is a potential vaccine that we could use.
“There are so many vaccines out there, but one thing that we are very clear about is that we are not going to use all the available vaccines in Nigeria.
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“At some point, we are going to draw a line in terms of the number of vaccines we would use, so that we can keep a close watch on the number of vaccines we are utilizing in Nigeria.”
Shuaib stated that the vaccine was developed by China’s Sinopharm’s Beijing Institute of Biological Products, “sometimes written as Beijing Bio-Institute of Biological Products”, explaining that there are sometimes two different acronyms, BBIBP and BIBP, for the same vaccine.
“It completed phase three trials in Argentina, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, Peru and United Arab Emirates (UAE), with over 60,000 participants. BBIBP-CorV shares, similar technology with CoronaVac and Covaxin, other inactivated virus vaccines for COVID-19,” he said.
“Its product name is SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine ‘Vero Cell’, not to be confused with the similar product name of CoronaVac.”
