Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo has revealed that Nigeria is expecting a delivery of about 84 million doses of the Covid 19 vaccines to curb the pandemic.
Prof Yemi Osinbajo spoke during a virtual Chatham House interactive session on Tuesday themed: “Priorities for Nigeria’s Post-COVID Recovery”.
In his words: “over 300,000 beneficiaries, as well as businesses have been supported during the pandemic “by providing salaries for three months for beneficiaries, which include private school teachers, artisans, road transporters, taxi cab operators, and commercial tricycle operators in the urban areas .
“We also sought to protect the most vulnerable, in particular, the urban poor who were also hard hit. What we did was to provide direct cash transfers to the urban poor, many of them who are captured in a social register. In the first phase of that, we are able to benefit about 1 million beneficiaries, and we are now in a position using the same social register to scale up the programme to about 20 million beneficiaries.”
“As part of our recovery efforts, Nigeria has taken delivery of about 4 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccines under the international COVAX scheme and we have commenced vaccination of our people. This year, we will receive 84 million doses of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine under that same scheme, which would be enough to vaccinate about 20 per cent of our population.”
