Vice President of Nigeria Kashim Shettima has pledged that President Bola Tinubu’s government will address the issues raised about funding primary health centers around the nation.
This comes as Bill Gates, Co-Chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, reaffirmed the charitable organization’s pledge to committing $7 billion to support routine immunization throughout the nation and throughout all of Africa.
Mr. Shettima named polio as one of the main issues with primary healthcare in the nation and added that the administration is thinking about offering “timely domestic financing for the procurement of vaccines, which couldn’t have come sooner, to boost our industrial capacity to produce vaccines.”
He made this statement on Thursday during a discussion hosted by the Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF) and attended by governors, Bill Gates, the co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Aliko Dangote, a business magnate and the founder of the Dangote Foundation.
Mr. Shettima observed that Nigeria’s three-dose pentavalent vaccine coverage against polio has increased from 33% in 2016 to 57% in 2021 in a statement released by the Office of the Vice President and signed by the Director of Information, Olusola Abiola.
About polio in Nigeria
The World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared Nigeria and the rest of Africa free of the Wild Polio Virus (WPV) on August 25, 2020, after the continent had been without the virus for three years.
The illness, which may have been avoided with sufficient vaccination, was finally eradicated in Nigeria, the last African nation.
Half of the world’s polio infections as of 2012 were in Nigeria. Polio is a viral disease that spreads from person to person, “mainly through a fecal-oral route or, less frequently, through contaminated water or food, and multiplies inside the intestines.”
Meanwhile, in 2021, approximately a year after the WHO’s certification, Adamawa State in northeastern Nigeria discovered cases of the type 2 vaccine-derived poliovirus in circulation.
Experts have identified a number of factors, including inadequate routine immunization coverage, vaccine rejection, limited access to some places, and subpar immunization programs, that contribute to the development.
He promised that the administration would work in conjunction with both governmental and non-governmental organizations to produce vaccines for children’s immunization, “to ensure that these vaccines are made available even to zero-dose children, of which ours, at 2 million, are the highest in the world after India.”
The vice president thanked the Nigerian government’s allies, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Dangote Foundation, whose compassion, he said, “shone through that uncertain period in our history.”
$7 billion commitment
Earlier in his remarks during the interactive session, Mr. Gates stated that his foundation had just made public plans to donate $7 billion to Africa over the course of the next four years in order to fund the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in Northern Nigeria and routine immunization programs in Nigeria.
President Tinubu and Mr. Gates, who came in Nigeria on Monday, spoke about potential areas of cooperation in the administration’s attempts to overhaul the health sector.
