COVID-19: Vaccine development in Nigeria, a progress -NIMR

BY Victoria Ogunrinde

The Nigeria Institute of Medical Research (NIMR), has disclosed that the institute is making progress with the research into COVID-19 vaccine and would in the next few months be able to come up with a candidate vaccine.

The Director General, NIMR, Professor Babatunde Lawal Salako, made this known while speaking at the Ministerial Health Sector Media Engagement in Abuja on Monday.

Salako said the institute was compelled to undertake the research for COVID-19 vaccine due to the public concern about its ravaging impact.

“We had to go back to the sequence of the virus, which we developed and started looking at how we can clone the virus. Now we have passed through those stages and we are going through bioformatics, trying to clone the virus so that we can come up with a candidate vaccine,” he said.

This medical fit came just as the federal government announced that its efforts at improving Primary Health Care (PHC) system across the country would save the lives of 3.7 million infants in the next 10 years.