Policy Brief on COVID-19 Vaccine Management in Nigeria

The novel Coronavirus, which was first discovered in 2019 in Wuhan, China, has continued its global spread with devastating effects while wreaking untold havoc across the globe. The latest data from the John Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Centre indicate that there are about 116,169, 119 cases recorded in 192 countries with 2,582,075 deaths.1 The data from the Nigeria Centre for Diseases Control (NCDC) as of March 8, 2021, shows that Nigeria has confirmed cases of 158,506 out of there are 18,647 active cases with 1,969 deaths recorded. It is needless to say that the COVID-19 pandemic is not only a health crisis of monumental magnitude but equally governance, political, social and economic crises which took the world unawares. This has posed significant threats to developing and developed economies and unsettled the political world, posing serious policy and governance challenges as policy-makers seek effective measures to tame the lethal virus. The virus that causes COVID-19 disease the SARS-COV2, is so named because of its “crown-like spikes”. Reports in the last quarter of 2020, highlighted the possible mutation in the virus with a new variant identified in Denmark. Later in the year, another variant was identified in the United Kingdom (UK) and another variant in South Africa2 in December 2020.