Nigeria would require N2.44tn in order to provide vaccines for 164.8 million of its 206 million citizens. The international community has offered Nigeria free delivery of 42 million doses of vaccines for controlling the spread of COVID-19.
The approved vaccines available globally are those produced by Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Oxford and Novavax.
At a press conference of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 in Abuja on Tuesday, the Executive Director of the National Primary Healthcare Development Agency, Faisal Shuaib, stated that 100,000 doses of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine would be received by the country at the end of January.
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According to Shuaib, the 42 million doses of the vaccines will be sufficient for 20 percent of Nigeria’s population.
Shuaib noted that the NPHCDA, the PTF, and the Federal Ministry of Health were working on financial requirements for procuring more vaccines.
The NPHCDA Executive Director also said the country needed to cover only 70 percent of its population with vaccination to battle the virus.
Although there are various vaccines, www.healthline.com states that Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine costs $19.5 per dose ($39 per two doses).
The United States’ Food and Drug Administration Agency had last month said Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is administered as a two-dose series, three weeks apart.
Based on the two-dose requirement for each of the 164.8 million Nigerians, it means the country will need $6.43bn or N2.44tn (using CBN official exchange rate of N379/$1) to procure the vaccine for them.
A professor of virologist, Oyewale Tomori, in an interview with The PUNCH on Wednesday, gave the costs of other vaccines
According to him, Moderna vaccine is between $10 and $50, Johnson & Johnson, $10 and Oxford, $3 to $4 per dose.
He, however, advised the Federal Government to not procure vaccines that the country lacked the facility to store.
Tomori said procuring a vaccine that would be difficult to store in Nigeria would be like adding to the problem of the pandemic in the country.
He said, “There are three or four different types of vaccines at the moment; there is the one from Pfizer that must be stored at -70°C; Moderna vaccine must be stored at -20°C and there are others that can be stored at fridge temperature.”
