Director-General (DG) of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, on Wednesday said the agency is working with international partners to ensure Nigeria gets COVID-19 vaccines with long expiration dates.
Adeyeye spoke against the backdrop of the one million doses of vaccines that expired in November and were destroyed by NAFDAC.
POLITICS NIGERIA recalls that 1,066,214 doses of expired AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines were destroyed at the Gosa Dumping site in Abuja.
Adeyeye told NAN that the expired vaccines had very short expiration dates which made it impossible to be administered in time due to logistics reasons.
“When developed countries started using the vaccine for many months, we didn’t have access to them until we started receiving donations, not just through COVAX alone but from some countries also,” she said.
“The expiration date was shorter than what it was supposed to be and between the time we tested and start using it, there was not enough time and that was the only reason not because we were careless.
“But going forward, we are working with international partners to ensure the expiration date of any vaccine we will be receiving are up to five or six months.”
