By Chioma Obinna

All over the world, vaccine apathy, which is a continuum between  vaccine acceptance and refusal, has remained the biggest challenge to the response to COVID-19 pandemic all over the globe.

In Nigeria, apart from the challenge of shortage of vaccines for over 200 million populations, many eligible citizens are either delaying or refusing COVID-19 vaccines despite the fact that the World Health Organisation, WHO, has declared them safe and efficacious against the dreaded virus.

However, experts are of the view that only vaccination can eliminate infections. Rooting for vaccination for all, they called for urgent need to address vaccine inequality and hesitancy. In the views of the General Manager of the Nigeria Solidarity Support Fund, NSSF, Dr Fejiro Chinye-Nwoko, Nigeria can only eliminate the disease when it achieves herd immunity. Meanwhile, achieving herd immunity means more vaccines for all, greater awareness and education on the importance of vaccines as well as its benefits.

In Nigeria, some private organisations such as the NSSF, a private-sector-led institution, borne out of a partnership between the Global Citizen and the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority, has cued into the Federal Government programme to boost vaccines capacity for one million vulnerable Nigerians in underserved communities across the country. The organisations will also be raising campaign to encourage Nigerians to accept the vaccines and promote benefits of vaccines.

According to the General Manager of NSSF, Fejiro Chinye-Nwoko, the coalition planned to procure one million vaccines for the country’s vulnerable and hard-to-reach population.

“The Coalition believes that everyone should have access to quality and affordable health care services when they need it, young Nigerians should be enabled with opportunities for self-empowerment and well-skilled for a post-COVID era and that the most vulnerable, disadvantaged, and marginalised groups in Nigeria should not be left behind”, she said.

Chinye-Nwoko, who noted that no one expected that the pandemic will persist after one year, said: “Nobody anticipated that the pandemic will still be ongoing by now; we saw the need to join forces to address the current pandemic. We came up with the idea to assist with COVID-19 vaccination, knowing full well that in order to stop the pandemic there is the need to achieve herd immunity.

“There are several ways to end the pandemic; we saw what the government was able to do with the lockdown in our country. However, that was not the most effective way to stop the pandemic. Another strategy is to build more Intensive Care Units and procure more oxygen for patients with severe cases. We all know that there is a limit to what we can do as regards this because of the limited resources. So, the best way to curb the spread of the COVID-19 is through vaccination.

“We intend to partner organisations to purchase more vaccines for the country. We also intend to look into the vaccine hesitancy issue in Nigeria. A lot of people are not willing to take the vaccine or maybe they are not aware of the benefits of the vaccine, so, they are a bit reluctant to get vaccinated”.

According to her, the coalition was formed to solve the post-COVID-19 impact on the health and economic sector in Nigeria because they know that post COVID-19; there would be a lot of things to deal with in terms of the economy and the health system in Nigeria.

Fielding questions from journalists in Lagos, she explained that in trying to help nip the problems in the bud and the fact that a third wave of the pandemic was around, they came up with three objectives which they intend to focus for 2021 and 2022 respectively.

Her words: “The first was to assist the vulnerable population in Nigeria, those who will be most hit by the pandemic in Nigeria with vaccination. The second objective is to strengthen the health system. We know that that out of all the sectors that have been impacted by COVID-19, the health sector is one of them. “The third objective is to re-skill the youths to regain economic stability. The pandemic has caused many people to lose their means of livelihood. So, we came with the objective to make the youths to be more economically competitive in the post-COVID-19 era.”

She said that with the third wave of the pandemic taking its toll on people, they have decided to join forces to address the current pandemic which led to the decision to assist with the COVID-19 vaccinations as that is the only way to end the pandemic.

“There are several ways to end the pandemic, one way is to prevent the spread which the government tried to do with the lockdown and we saw that in our country that was not the most effective way of stopping the pandemic”, she said.

“The second way is to address COVID in terms of case management, building Intensive Care Units, ICUs, isolation centres and getting oxygen to people really sick from this pandemic trying to manage cases, and we say that, that is further depleting our resources because there’s just so much the health system can do with our population and limited resources, and the third is preventing this pandemic by vaccinating everyone so that even though the vaccine may not prevent COVID infection it will prevent the adverse effect or death from the infection”.

Speaking on the importance of vaccination, Chinye-Nwoko explained that vaccination would not only protect vulnerable populations like the elderly but will save many people from dying.

Listing the different adverse effects to include permanent lung damage, she said that even after people have recovered they still have lung damage that leads to lung diseases in the future.

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“When we get about 80-90 percent of the population vaccinated the remaining 10 or 20 percent, that are skeptical are protected by those vaccinated.

The second benefit is that we know that the virus has mutated over time, now we have another variant, tomorrow we may have another variant if we don’t curb the virus now by vaccinating another variant that will be more virulent may emerge. The earlier the better before it mutates to other variants that we can’t cope with”, she said.

“We haven’t handled HIV/AIDS properly, we have not had a hold on malaria, even respiratory tract infection, we’ve not had a hold on it because antibiotics are very resistant to the organisms so why do we want to add to it, we don’t have the resources to afford that so it’s better we just prevent this pandemic from blowing into something else.”

On re-skilling of Nigerian youths, Chinye-Nwoko explained that the youths who would be re-skilled would be used to carry out advocacy programmes geared towards tackling vaccine apathy.

Her words: “The activity we plan is a youth focus campaign and it’s going to focus on artistic expression of Nigerian youths using readily available digital tools. We know that a great proportion of our population is the youth, and we also know that the youths are also influencers meaning that the youths have a lot of ability because of the social media, influence peer behaviours. So if we target the youths we have more influence over the information.

“We are going to be working with the government, especially the federal government, we are already in conversations with the National Primary Healthcare Development Agency and they have done a fantastic job in terms of storage and distribution to the 36 states so we won’t have a system, we will work with them and support them despite the challenges”.