By Fortune Ulu
More than 34 countries across the world have approved and started administering the COVID vaccines to their populations in order to be able to stem the ravaging impact of the pandemic on their citizens and residents.
Curiously, with the second wave of COVID-19 threatening to have severe negative impact on nations and their economies, Nigeria, the supposed giant of Africa, is yet to take serious steps to avail her citizens the benefit of the vaccines which have been approved and deployed in these countries. Even in Africa, Seychelles has already offered her citizens the benefit of protection against COVID-19 with the roll out of vaccination.
The following countries are in the list of countries that have rolled out the vaccines: Argentina, Belarus, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Kuwait, Malta, Mexico, Oman, Poland, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, UK and United States.
In Nigeria there are already squabbles over the sharing formula for the paltry 100,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine which the government said it was expecting before the end of the month. This is for a country of over 200 million citizens.
The Executive Director of the National Primary Healthcare Development Agency, Faisal Shuaib, who gave this indication last week during a press conference of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19, said the country would later in the year receive 42 million free doses of COVID-19 vaccines.
But the Nigerian Medical Association, the National Association of Nigerian Nurses and Midwives and a coalition of labour and civil society organisations, the Alliance for the Survival of COVID-19 and Beyond, are angry with the released sharing formula for the vaccines and have advised the government to ensure transparency in the distribution. As reported by The Punch newspaper, they would want priority to be given to frontline health workers and the aged during the vaccination of Nigerians against the deadly coronavirus.
This is even as Ogun, Oyo, and Cross River states faulted the number of COVID-19 vaccine doses allocated to them by the Federal Government.
The Benue State Government said the issue of allocation of COVID-19 vaccine doses ought to have been discussed at the Nigeria Governors’ Forum. All the states said they were not involved in deciding the sharing formula for the vaccine doses. But Lagos and Oyo states stated that they planned to buy COVID-19 vaccines on their own.
The NPHCDA, at a webinar on Friday, released the sharing formula for 100,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
According to a tracker developed by OurWorldInData—a research partnership between the University of Oxford and the British non-profit Global Change Data Lab—three countries have vaccinated a higher proportion of their populations than the rest of the world: Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain.
These Middle Eastern states have administered the jabs to 20.93%, 10.99%, and 5.25% of their populations respectively, while the US, Denmark, and UK trail further behind at 2.02%, 1.98%, and 1.94%. The rest of the world hovers around 0.5%. (These are based on population estimates from the United Nations World Population and other trackers, such as Bloomberg’s, may show slightly different proportions.)
Medical authorities in the three countries approved the jabs early. Bahrain was the second country in the world to approve the Pfizer/BioNTech jab, and it approved the Sinopharm vaccine in November. Israel was the third to approve Moderna’s jab on January 5 and it has secured 6 million doses of it already. It certainly helps that the three countries can afford it.
Israel began the trial with the transportation and delivery of the vaccine on December 9 and launched its vaccine rollout on December 19, more than a week before the European Union. It hasn’t said how much it paid for doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines, but health minister Yuli Edelstein told The New York Times that even if his country overpaid, it will have been worth it to reopen the Israeli economy early.
What can the rest of the world learn?
At Sheba, Hareven is part of a team that collects lessons learned from Israel’s vaccination drive. He highlights a few:
- First, reach out to the leaders of minority communities who are more skeptical of the vaccine, wherever they may be. Get them on board and “earn their confidence.”
- Second, recruit volunteers to alleviate the strain on overworked healthcare staff. For example, Sheba called on retired staff to vaccinate the elderly in retirement homes so that frontline healthcare workers could stay in hospitals and clinics. “You will find out that in crisis times, people want to volunteer. You just need to ask them.”
- Third, invest in good digital infrastructure to process and centralize large volumes of health data—like shares of immunized people in a given area—in real time. But “don’t do heroic IT efforts,” he warns. “Play with what you have and adjust it for Covid.”
