- Says daily vaccination now 200,000
Onyebuchi Ezigbo in Abuja
The federal government has put the total number of eligible persons that have so far received COVID-19 vaccines in the country at 14,093,873.
It also said 5,252,406 eligible Nigerians have so far been fully vaccinated, while 416,980 Nigerians have received their booster dose, in line with the recommendations of the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Speaking to journalists in Abuja, at the first media briefing on the progress being made in terms of COVID-19 vaccination campaign, the Executive Director of the National Primary HealthCare Development Agency (NPHCDA), Dr. Faisal Shuaib said the rate of vaccination has increased from 100,000 per day as of December 2021, to 200,000 this month.
He said the sensitisation campaign on the COVID-19 vaccination exercise was yielding results in various centres across the country.
“Our record as of today, Tuesday January 25th 2022 shows that 14,093,873 eligible persons have received the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine in Nigeria while 5,252,406 eligible Nigerians have been fully vaccinated.
“However, as one would expect, these results are not evenly distributed across the states of the Federation. Our deep dive into state performances reveals that Nasarawa, Jigawa, FCT, Ogun and Kwara have remained the top 5 performing states on COVID-19 vaccine uptake,” he said.
Shuaib said Jigawa and Lagos have each vaccinated about 1.5million eligible Nigerians with the first dose, while the FCT, Nasarawa, Lagos and Delta are presently leading on second dose administration with more than 10 per cent of eligible populations in each
of the states already
vaccinated.
Shuaib further spoke on the spread of COVID-19 variants, saying the reason for their emergence was due to the large proportion of the eligible population who have not yet been vaccinated.
He said vaccination rate in many parts of the world had given the virus time to mutate and fight back.
Shuaib used the opportunity to notify the public that the current phase of COVID-19 mass vaccination would integrate the campaign with childhood immunisation and other public healthcare services (PHC).
“What this simply means is that alongside the COVID-19 vaccines, childhood vaccines will also be available at COVID-19 vaccination sites. Consequently, parents or guardians with children aged zero to 23 months are urged to take them along to the vaccination sites.
“The childhood vaccines protect against polio, whooping cough, measles, yellow fever, tetanus, tuberculosis, and other childhood preventable diseases. This is to ensure that while we are trying so hard to control the transmission of COVID-19, we do not neglect other PHC services or even have outbreaks of childhood vaccine preventable diseases on our hands,” he said.
