The Nigerian Centre for Disease Control has said that over 100 million Nigerians would have received the COVID-19 vaccine by March 2021. This was stated by the NCDC Director-General, Chikwe Ihekweazu while speaking on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily programme on Thursday.
Ihekweazu expressed confidence in the COVID-19 vaccine saying Nigeria has been able to eliminate polio and fight smallpox through vaccines. He said, “No medical intervention, not one, has saved more lives since the beginning of mankind than vaccination. No great hospital, no surgery, no medicine, not even antibiotics, has saved more lives than vaccines. We’ve just celebrated, in-between this pandemic, the elimination of polio in Nigeria. We completely eliminated smallpox through the effort of humans through vaccination.”
The NCDC DG said that efforts to educate Nigerians on the benefits of vaccines are currently going on around the country.
“We are going to work very hard to educate Nigerians on the benefits of vaccines, the opportunity it gives us to return to our normal lives, and that’s what’s going on around the country right now,” he said.
“By the time we get this vaccine sometime in the first quarter of next year, there will be hundreds of millions of people that would already have received this vaccine,” he concluded.