Covid Vaccines :We Have to Work with the Country We Have, Not the One We Wish We Had, Nigeria’s Disease Control Boss, Ihekweazu Says

Director-general of the NCDC, Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu said this on Friday when he featured on an ARISE News programme, The Morning Show.

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He said Nigeria is expecting to receive vaccines within the next few days and in terms of getting the vaccines out, the NCDC boss said a well-developed architecture is already in place.

“The challenge, what we are having to do afresh in defining priority groups to get the vaccines. The first priority group is fairly straight forward, they are healthcare workers.

“Once we start going into the second levels of prioritization in terms of age which is how we do this, comorbidities are a very difficult work to actually manage data on, on a national level,” Ihekweazu told ARISE News.

“We have to work with the country we at, not the one we wish we had. So to be honest, we don’t have a registry of people that have diabetes, and high blood pressure and all that across the country.

“But there are alternative ways to achieve this, the primary method we use is age and that’s what many other countries have used to prioritise people.

Dr Ihekweazu also stated that Lagos state and other states in the country that have had a high level of infection will also be prioritised in terms of geographical prioritisation.

By Abel Ejikeme