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.
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. “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.
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.