The Federal Government says it is worried over citizens disregard for preventive protocols against the COVID-19 pandemic, especially with the confirmation of the Indian variant of the virus in the country.
The Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, said this on Thursday during a television programme.
“The Indian variant is not only in Nigeria but also in 44 other countries,” he said.
“The fact that that variant is in Nigeria is not in itself a reason for concern. The reasons for concern are what we are doing firstly as a government, but secondly as the people.
“There is no point running around and attending weddings without masks – what many of us are doing, and then worrying about the emergence of a variant. We advise Nigerians to do what they can do, while we at the NCDC will continue to do its best to protect the health of Nigerians every day.
“If we look at our high risk to this pandemic that a lot of us have suffered from, I would like to think about it in three broad categories. One is the risk associated with the virus itself. Two is how you mitigate that risk which involves the vaccination programme. The third is what people do. We are working very hard to find the viruses, sequence them, and increase our sequencing capacity so that we can detect new variants when they do occur.”
“Concerning the efficacy of the existing AstraZeneca vaccine against the circulating strain, there is no evidence that the AstraZeneca vaccine is less efficacious against the strain from India circulating.
“The challenge we have is getting enough people vaccinated quickly enough so that we can prevent them from having infections. Our biggest challenge with that is in the global supply chain, which we are working very hard on.”