By Chimezie Godfrey
The World Health Organization (WHO) Country Representative in Nigeria, Dr. Walter Kazadi Mulomboo has said that the WHO has not disqualified any country in Africa from accessing COVID-19 vaccines.
Dr Mulomboo who made this disclosure on Saturday in Abuja stressed that the WHO is rather making efforts that will enable all countries to access vaccines expeditiously.
This is coming on the heels of rumour making the rounds that the World Health Organization has disqualified Nigeria from accessing the COVID-19 vaccines.
Dr Mulomboo said,”WHO has not disqualified any country in Africa from accessing COVID-19 vaccines through the COVAX facility, but rather is supporting all countries to access vaccines as quickly as possible.
“Currently, all countries on the continent are expected to start accessing the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccines by the end of February.
“The vaccine is under review by WHO for Emergency Use Listing and the outcome is expected soon.
“Of the 88 million AstraZeneca doses allocated to African countries for the first phase, Nigeria has received by far the largest allocation, with 16 million doses.”
Dr Mulomboo disclosed that in addition to the Astra Zeneca doses, there is an initial limited volume of Pfizer vaccine available through COVAX.
According to him, demand for the initial allocation of 1.2 million Pfizer doses was exceptionally high.
“COVAX received interest from 72 countries around the world, of which 51 countries were considered by the review committee as “ready” (Nigeria was among these countries) and 18 countries in total were finally chosen to receive initial Pfizer doses.
“On the Africa continent, as of the 18 January deadline, COVAX received 13 submissions and a multi-agency committee evaluated the proposals of which 9 were recommended as ready to deploy the Pfizer vaccine including Nigeria.
“Unfortunately, it was not feasible to provide each of these 51 countries with Pfizer doses, due to a number of factors including the limited capacity for Pfizer to handle many countries at once. Therefore, spreading the limited doses across all the 51 countries deemed ‘ready’. could have not achieved the intended public health benefit,” he noted.
Dr Mulomboo also revealed that after epidemiological data was taken into account, the decision was taken to proportionally balance the number of self-financing and AMC Participants, as well as participants across all 6 WHO regions.