Following the plan of the Federal Government that Covid-19 vaccines would be available in Nigeria at the end of January, Virologists have advised the Federal Government that the COVID-19 vaccine is not necessary at the moment in Nigeria.
Prof. Rosemary Audu, a virologist from the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research had made this known in an interview. She said that there would be no need for the vaccine since about 70 per cent of the population in the country had developed antibodies against the virus.
Buttressing this point, Prof. Sunday Omilabu who is The Director, Human and Zoonotic Virology, College of Medicine, University of Lagos, had said in an interview with The Punch on Sunday, that it would be dangerous to introduce COVID-19 vaccine to Nigerians at the moment.
Stressing this further, he said, “There is something in us that is mitigating the virulence of the virus in our body. We may like to call it a kind of immunity that we enjoy through our environment. This is coming to us as an advantage; we have that herd immunity now, if anything comes in now, it may derail what we are benefiting from”.
He added that “For us, I would suggest that they allow people to still use their herd immunity which they are enjoying and is a natural gift. They should concentrate on those few people that have some medical conditions that have made their level of herd immunity very low. The vaccine is dangerous now because we don’t know how it is going to behave in the long run.”
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