Abubakar Yusuf, an informal Nigerian trader, said he was scared to get a COVID-19 vaccine after hearing the country had stocks of expired vaccines.
That changed, however, when health authorities destroyed more than a million expired doses last month.
“We’ve been scared before, seriously. But the way people have been taking it, they are well, they are doing their normal business, nothing do them so in that case we decided to take it. We have been scared before. Seriously,” Yusuf told Reuters after getting an AstraZeneca dose at a market in Abuja.
Nigeria, like other African countries, initially struggled to get doses as rich nations snapped up limited supplies.
Deliveries later picked up, but some shots donated by individual countries or via the global vaccine-sharing scheme COVAX arrived with a very short shelf life, leading them to expire.
Nigeria has said it will no longer accept vaccines close to expiry.
The daily vaccine uptake doubled to 200 000 doses in December and January, Faisal Shuaib, head of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency said.
In December, Nigeria destroyed more than a million doses of expired AstraZeneca vaccines as it sought to assure a wary public that they had been taken out of circulation.
Nigerians like Yusuf were rattled by reports of vaccines with looming expiry dates and worried about whether the shots they would get were safe and effective, complicating the government’s efforts to get as many shots into arms as possible.
“It’s good for government to discard those ones that they know are bad and they have done so, why can’t we come out and take it? It’s good for us to take it… its for our own sake,” said Gabriel Allesiloye, who described himself as a Christian evangelist, after getting his COVID-19 vaccination at the Abuja market.
Africa’s top public health bodies have now called for donated COVID-19 vaccines to come with a shelf life of three to six months.
John Nkengasong, Director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Africa’s top public health body, told a virtual media briefing on Thursday that news of expired vaccines had created “some kind of hesitation” among skeptical citizens.
Nkengasong noted more African countries were recording increases in the number of people being vaccinated, he said.
Around 2.6% of Nigeria’s population have been fully vaccinated, while 14 million received a first dose.
