Nigeria has stepped up arrangement for procurement of Johnson & Johnson Vaccine. The country plans to get 29.6 million doses of the vaccine through the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust led by Afreximbank, the finance ministry said.
The government is working on a supplementary budget to cover vaccine procurement and delivery, Finance Minister Zainab Ahmed said in a statement on Friday. Already, 29 billion naira has been released for the deployment of vaccines, which is 52% of what is required from 2021 to 2022, she said.
Nigeria has set a target of vaccinating 70% of its citizens who are 18 years and above between this year and next, Ahmed said. The vaccine commitment through the COVAX initiative would cover 43.1 million of the country’s population.
So far, Nigeria received about 4 million doses of a vaccine developed by AstraZeneca Plc and the University of Oxford in March with about 1.3 million people getting their first doses as of March 6.
-Bloomberg