By Abdullahi M. Gulloma
Abuja
The Executive Director of National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), Dr Faisal Shuaib, said Monday that the agency plans to administer COVID-19 vaccines on about 109 million Nigerians in the next two years.
The NPHCDA boss, who disclosed this at the briefing of the Presidential Task Force on Control of COVID-19 in Abuja, said the figure excludes those that are under 18 years.
“We remain in anticipation of about 57 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from the COVAX Facility and the AU. Working with the States, the Federal Government plans to vaccinate all eligible population from 18 years and above, including pregnant women.
“However, the decision to vaccinate any pregnant woman will be made in consultation with her healthcare provider. There will be considerations of whether she is at high risk of contracting Covid-19 or not. She is likely to be at high risk for example, if she is a frontline health worker, a support staff or a first responder in the different spheres of the security architecture of our country.
“This guidance is based on the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE). After excluding those that are under 18 years old, we plan to vaccinate approximately 109m Nigerians that will be eligible for COVID-19 vaccination over the course of 2 years,” he said.
He said the federal government had received the commitment of 1,500,000 doses of AstraZeneca from the Government of India and 100,000 doses from MTN.
“These eligible populations have been identified using the World Health Organization(WHO), vaccine allocation framework and prioritization roadmap, as well as the disease burden data from the Nigeria Center for Disease Control (NCDC).
“They are the frontline healthcare workers, support staff including those that work in high risk areas such as point of entry workers, rapid response teams, contact tracing teams, COVID-19 vaccination teams and strategic leadership, people aged 50 years and above and people aged 18 – 49 years with significant co-morbidities and additional at-risk groups,” he said.
He said to facilitate the implementation process, the Technical Working Group (TWG) had come up with a strategy of pre-registration and scheduling of the target population to avoid over-crowding at vaccination posts.“We have come up with a strategy called the TEACH approach, which will harness all the benefits of traditional, electronic, assisted and concomitant house-to-house registration to optimize the use of innovative technology,” he said.