Nigeria and High Vaccine Hesitancy

It affected our lives, hitting every corner of the world. Airports shut, borders closed, businesses embracing a work from home policy, physical distancing measures and mask policies put in place. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic is still very much around, coming in waves and variants. One thing was for sure, that in the heat of the pandemic, scientists, virologists and infectious diseases experts brainstormed to find a panacea to this muddle. It took about two years for vaccines to be developed and finally approved by the World Health Organization.

An Eureka moment came eventually, where many options became available in the market. From single to double doses and eventually boosters, many countries began their vaccination campaigns. However, vaccine rollout has been lopsided in Nigeria ever since donations were received from the global north. In fact, the latest records per the World Health Organization puts 6.5% of Nigeria’s eligible population as fully vaccinated. One might wonder why the population is highly hesitant to get vaccinated. Even though there has been evidence of vaccine inequity in distribution to low- and medium-income countries, vaccine skepticism is a big player too.

Just as the famous Tuskegee study in the United States accounted for a significant portion of the African American population to remain vaccine hesitant, in Nigeria instances like the 1996 Trovan case for paediatric meningitis is one ringing in the ears of the COVID-19 vaccine skeptics akin to America’s Tuskegee study. The World Health Organization has renewed usage of the word “infodemic” these surreal times. The infodemic is a cocktail of a fast and far-reaching spread of information, both accurate and inaccurate. In the case of COVID-19, the infodemic has centered around vaccines connected to 5G telecommunication satellites, chips and alteration of genetic material. The infodemic has further propelled vaccine skepticism, keeping the percentage of the fully vaccinated low even after a satisfactory equitable distribution of donated vaccines to Nigeria.

Vaccine hesitancy is generally linked to a mistrust of the health systems and authorities, and to fight it there has to be community level engagement. Trusted leaders such as religious and political figures have to be actively involved. Furthermore, there has to be transparency on the part of the health systems in keeping the population informed about the vaccine manufacturing process, contents, potential side effects and overall benefit.

The billion-naira question remains with such low vaccination rates in Nigeria, how do we explain the less than 300,000 cases in three years of the pandemic? Many schools of thought have postulated a discrepancy in case reporting due to lack of resources for accurate data measuring, while others have attributed the low incidence and prevalence of COVID-19 to the presence of sunlight, vitamin D and even histories of previous infections with malaria. In the light of all these postulations, just as scientists came up with an answer to vaccines, I hope we find answers to this paradoxical relationship someday.

Olawale Adeyemi is a family medicine physician and COVID-19 researcher in the United States