Nigerian authorities have announced that COVID-19 vaccines with short shelf lives will no longer be accepted after the country was unable to use 1 million doses before they expired.
Nigeria will no longer accept COVID-19 vaccinations with limited shelf life after 1 million doses expired in Africa’s most populous country before the shots could be used.
While some of the dosages sent to Nigeria were close to expire, authorities have stated that some donated vaccinations had only a few weeks left to be distributed to individuals before they became ineffective.
According to Faisal Shuaib, the president of Nigeria’s National Primary Health Care Development Agency, outdated vaccines that have not been used in a timely manner would be destroyed. He didn’t say what Nigerian officials would consider a shelf life that was too short.
Only 1.9 percent of Nigeria’s 206 million people have been properly vaccinated. Despite the fact that at least 30 million doses are currently available, authorities claim that the rush to deliver nearly-expired ones has added to the strain.
Other African countries have likewise struggled to make timely use of supplied doses. Earlier this year, Malawi destroyed over 20,000 expired vaccines, and South Sudan stated it had to waste tens of thousands of doses.
The World Health Organization’s regional director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, said Tuesday that the issue of expired vaccines is a worldwide one. In Africa, less than a quarter of one percent of medicines have gone unused.
“It’s critical to remove the perception that, even as we express concern about vaccination supply, millions of doses are being thrown away or expiring in Africa,” she added. “No, that isn’t true.”
Nigeria is starting to witness a rise in the number of new infections two weeks after the country’s first omicron variant case, according to Shuaib. However, he continued, there has been no evidence of higher hospitalizations so far.
