Following the recent development where about one million doses of vaccines got expired and destroyed, the Director General of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, has said the agency is working with international partners to ensure that Nigeria will only receive vaccines with long expiration dates.
NAFDAC, the National Primary Health Care Development Agency and the Abuja Environmental Protection, it would be recalled, destroyed about one million doses of expired vaccines in November, 2021, a development that generated reactions from many Nigerians.
While speaking with newsmen in Lagos on Wednesday, Adeyeye said the expired vaccines had very short expiration dates which made it impossible to be administered in time due to logistics reasons.
According to the NAFDAC DG, “When developed countries started using the vaccine for many months, we didn’t have access to them until we started receiving donations, not just through COVAX alone but from some countries also.
“The expiration date was shorter than what it was supposed to be and between the time we tested and start using it, there was not enough time and that was the only reason not because we were careless. But going forward, we are working with international partners to ensure that the expiration date of any vaccine we will be receiving are up to five or six months.”
Adeyeye urged Nigerians to continue to adhere to the safety measures given by the various health authorities to further curb the spread of the pandemic, saying a lot is still not known about the new Omnicron variant of COVID-19, adding that studies are still going on globally about the variant.
