The pioneer Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control Abdulsalam Nasidi has called for quality assurance in ensuring mistakes are averted when Nigerians begin to get inoculated with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines.
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On Tuesday, Nigeria received about 4 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and is expected to step up the vaccination campaign to innoculate citizens against the coronavirus.
Nasidi, a Professor of Infectious Diseases is however of the view that Nigeria needs to put in place mechanisms that will ensure the country does not end up with a good product that was produced abroad, brought to the country and end up putting the wrong product into the arms of Nigerians.
Professor Nasidi stated this on Wednesday when he featured on an ARISE News programme.
“The logistics of handling it in terms of getting the vaccines in the right quality conditions right into the arms of the vaccine is very key,” the former NCDC boss said.
“So moving the vaccines from the central store to the zonal store to the state store and finally to the primary healthcare vaccination centres is so important that we need to put in place mechanisms that will ensure that we don’t end up with good products, produced in Europe or India brought to our country and then we end up putting the wrong product into the arms of Nigerians.
“So there must be in place mechanisms to do what we regard as quality assurance. This is an added job that you are putting on the healthcare workers but I am very proud to announce that the federal ministry of health has led through the NPHCDA on mass training for those who are going to handle these vaccines.
“Therefore, what is left is to ensure that the logistics are adequate and the healthcare workers are motivated, and not to have the experience that we had during the polio immunisation where there were incidences of pilfering, incidences of discarding the vaccines and bringing records.”
By Abel Ejikeme
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