Nigeria lacks capacity to manufacture vaccines — Adigwe, DG, NIPRED

BY JOHN NWOKOCHA, Abuja

Amidst expectations and anxiety over commencement of the anti-COVID-19 vaccination of Nigerians, as the Coronavirus infection spreads in the country with more people dying of the virus’ complications, the Director General of the National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development (NIPRED), Dr Obi Peter Adigwe, has said that Nigeria does not have capacity to produce vaccines.

He spoke against the backdrop of the proposition by health experts calling on the federal government to take urgent steps to accelerate the process of vaccines production not only to meet the needs of its over 200 million population but also to contain the raging Coronavirus pandemic as the government is experiencing delays in importation of foreign vaccines. The experts had raised the alarm that Nigeria may not get enough supplies of doses of imported vaccines needed to attend to the emergency level the pandemic has reached across the country.

The federal government had announced in December 2020 that it secured 100,000 Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines expected to arrive Nigeria before the end of January. The government said it was targeting not less than 40% of the population for vaccination against Covid-19 by the end of this year.

But speaking in an exclusive interview in Abuja, on Monday, Adigwe said that to talk about local production of vaccines for now was a pipe dream. According to him, the country does not have the capacity to manufacture vaccines. He also said that Africa does not have the requisite capacity to manufacture vaccines. “Africa cannot give what it does not have,” he said.

But when asked specifically to narrow it down to Nigeria if the country has the capacity to manufacture vaccines.   Hear the DG: “I was specific. I said vaccines manufacturing capacity, not capacity in general.

“Here at NIPRED we have close to seventy five Masters and PHDs all aggregated in various value chains of pharmaceutical and fighting medicinal drug development and I can comfortably say that we have world class scientists here at the institute. But, is not just the scientists that make up the capacity, you need the infrastructure, you also need the equipment, you also need the policy environment.”

He continued: “So, yes, we have world class scientists. But unless those other factors are also in place you cannot say you have the full capacity to produce the type of results that your peers who are in the other settings where all these factors are in place can produce.”

This is coming on the heel of a recent report by the United Nations (UN) that paints a disturbing picture of the pandemic in the Africa continent.

In the report, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said less than 20,000 doses of these vaccines were administered in Africa, representing less than 0.1 per cent of the COVID-19 vaccines administered worldwide, despite the continent making up about 20 per cent of the global population.

Further revelation is that over 70 million doses of the approved COVID-19 vaccines have been administered so far globally.

Guterres said a wide vaccination campaign is needed to prevent global immunity gaps which could put everyone at risk.

Speaking with the same breath the NIPRED DG, stated that vaccines are only one out of three broad categories of interventions for Covid-19. Under pharmaceutical interventions, he disclosed that there is vaccines, conventional medicines and fighter medicines.

He however, enjoined all stakeholders to support the institute’s strive for the need for infrastructure, funding and quality environment as factors that would enable it to have the full capacity required to harvest expected results. “There is still need for more funding by Government as well as by stakeholders such as philanthropists and development partners,” he stressed.

Adigwe therefore urged the media to engage philanthropists and other well meaning Nigerians to support the institute’s effort.