Lai: Low vaccination rate in developing countries will affect fight against COVID

Lai Mohammed, minister of information and culture, says the poor vaccination rate in developing countries will negatively affect the fight against COVID.

The minister’s comment comes hours after the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) announced three new cases of the Omicron COVID variant on Wednesday.

Following an earlier announcement of the detection of the Omicron variant in South Africa, several countries across the world have banned travellers from some African countries — including Nigeria.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has insisted that developing countries should benefit from improved access to COVID vaccines to prevent the spread of infections.

In a statement on Wednesday, Mohammed, who is currently in Spain to attend the 24th general assembly of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), said countries should be able to access COVID vaccines without any form of discrimination.

“‘Even before the clinical trials were completed, millions of doses of the most promising vaccines have been bought by Britain, US, Japan and the European block countries,” he said.

“Some of these countries bought doses five times the size of their population.

“There are fears that these unilateral deals will deprive the poorest countries of access to these life-saving commodities.”

The minister said while developed countries have to increase their healthcare spending by less than one percent to cover for the additional cost of vaccines, poor countries have to do that by about 60 percent.

According to him, slow or delayed vaccination rollout in low and middle-income countries has left many of their citizens vulnerable to COVID variants.

“Most developed countries have already vaccinated about 60 percent of their population, and some developing countries are below 5 percent,” the minister said.

“My country, Nigeria, the largest economy in Africa, has just vaccinated only about 3 percent of our population.”