Last Tuesday, I attended the African Vaccination Week (AVW) webinar, to reflect on the lessons learnt from the past 5-years’ AVW. Very distinguished professionals formed the panelist including Kaduna State’s commissioner for Health, Hon. Dr. Amina Baloni.
Every year, in the last week of April, the World Health Organization (WHO) celebrates African Vaccination Week in conjunction with World Immunization Week. The week allows us to highlight the importance of vaccines in our daily lives and how they protect us, young and old, from more than 25 vaccine-preventable diseases.
Africa has undoubtedly benefitted from the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. The COVAX Facility now has ten COVID-19 vaccines accessible, with more in the research and development pipeline. Despite the fact that 480 million COVID-19 vaccines have been distributed throughout Africa to date, making it the continent's largest vaccine launch in history, only 18.7% of the continent's population is completely vaccinated. This performance is well behind the global average of 58%.
"Long Life for All," this year's theme, emphasizes the life-saving potential of vaccines for everyone, everywhere. Despite this, tens of millions of Africans are still missing out on some or all of their scheduled vaccinations against diseases that have been eradicated by vaccines for decades. We must not overlook the urgent need to boost routine immunization efforts while we try to accelerate COVID-19 vaccination efforts. COVID-19 containment efforts have had a severe influence on routine immunization since 2020, resulting in tens of millions of African infants losing out on critical childhood immunizations. The diphtheria, tetanus toxoid, and pertussis (whooping cough) vaccines, as well as the measles vaccination, are among them.
The truth is that, diseases that have been previously eradicated can resurface if vaccination is halted. For instance, a case of wild poliovirus type 1 was discovered in Malawi earlier this year. Meanwhile, since August 2020, this vaccine-preventable disease had been eradicated from the African Region. I applaud Malawi's government for acting rapidly to curb the outbreak, by immunizing 2.7 million children under the age of five against the disease. However, the tragedy serves as a timely reminder that on our continent and particularly Nigeria, routine immunizations should be non-negotiable.
At the webinar, one important point that stood out for me was the urgent need for Nigeria and indeed Africa, to begin the process of manufacturing indigenous vaccines. African countries started receiving COVID-19 vaccine after the rest of the world had served their citizens with at least the first doze of the various vaccines. We can not continue to depend on charity when it comes to vaccine. It is indubitable, that Nigeria for instance, has the technical competence, skill and human resources for undertaking the production of a globally acceptable vaccine against any of the vaccine-preventable diseases. But lack of deliberate government coordination, political will and financial commitment continue to hinder this developmental milestone.
Nonetheless, this is a task that must be done and various stakeholders must start to think along this line, for the sake of the future.
© Ojore Godday Aghedo, June 2022
