In less than one month, Nigeria is expected to receive 100, 000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine. According to the Director-General of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, NPHCDA, Faisal Shuaib, the doses are not for all Nigerians but about 50,000 vulnerable people, frontline workers and health workers. However, there have been criticisms over the expected doses and the possibility of achieving the right storage of the vaccines from the Pfizer-BioNTech version donated by COVAX facility.
Although the Federal Government claimed to have procured 2100 cubic ultra-cold chain facility in Abuja, experts are worried about the temperate nature of the country, saying Nigeria does not have adequate storage facilities to hold vaccines at the required temperature of minus 70/80 degrees Celsius required for the Pfizer version of the COVID-19 vaccines recommended by the World Health Organisation, WHO. To them, the best vaccine option for Nigeria is to produce its own version the way it was done in India, Sunday Vanguard reports.
Towards the third quarter of 2020, there were over 140 vaccine candidates. Before December last year, the Pfizer-BioNTech and the Moderna COVID-19 vaccines were introduced. On the heels of that was the Oxford-AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine. Recently, India added to the list by producing a version of the Oxford- AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccines which they called Covishield vaccines. It was unveiled on January 3, 2021. This is in addition to Chinese vaccines whose efficacy was put at about 50 percent. Altogether, globally, there are about five types of vaccines for COVID-19 from different research working groups that are available for use.
But WHO has gone ahead to recommend, before now, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. And riding on that, the Presidential Task Force, PTF, and the Federal Government proposed the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for Nigerians.

Pfizer's version of the COVID-19 vaccine is not suitable for storage in a climate like Nigeria, so Nigeria's vaccine supply and demand are very tight, and I only look forward to the early production of its own vaccine.