WHO vaccine hub: Excluding Nigeria would have been injustice, says Garba Shehu

Garba Shehu, presidential spokesman, says it would have been “injustice” if Nigeria was not selected among the countries approved to receive technology for the production of COVID vaccines.

Shehu spoke on Tuesday while featuring on ‘Good Morning Nigeria’, a Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) programme.

TheCable had reported that the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced Nigeria among six African countries to receive the technology for the production of the mRNA vaccines.

According to Shehu, Nigeria deserves to benefit from the deployment of the vaccine production technology considering the country’s influence in Africa.

“Before this time, the World Health Organisation (WHO) had made the choice of Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa and Senegal as the only four countries to produce. We must give credit to the minister of heath because there is a lot of hard work behind the scenes,” he said.

“The president made a deliberate choice to choose the committees to work on. He made a deliberate choice of choosing peace, security and good governance which of course are existential threats to our own country.

“He also chose the issue of health and vaccine production in the belief that with all of the efforts we have been making, a decision would be made to choose Nigeria, because if Nigeria is left out, it will be a lot of injustice.

“One out of every five Africans is a Nigerian and the people are here; the educated people and all of the skills. So, why leave us out? It’s a major achievement that we got this.”