COVID-19: Vaccines Must Undergo Clinical Trial In Nigeria – NMA

The Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) says it will not allow COVID-19 vaccines to be administered on Nigerians until they are subjected to clinical trial.

Innocent Ujah, president of the association, made this known on Monday when he featured on Sunrise Daily, a programme on Channels Television,

He noted that it was imperative for the vaccines to undergo clinical trial in Nigeria in order to ascertain its efficacy and adaptability.

He said he was not sure if Africans partook in the development of the vaccines, hence the need for evaluation before administration on Nigerians.

“The vaccines will come out, if it comes to Nigeria, we need to quickly do our own evaluation,” he said.

“I’m not sure, I cannot say with 100 percent certain that in the process of developing these vaccines and the clinical trial, whether an African countries are involved.

He said since the involvement of African countries in development of the vaccines could not be ascertained, then there’s need for swift clinical trial because of the biology, environment and genetics composition, .

He said the trial was not in way questioning the potency and safety of the vaccine, noting that “the responses vary from place to place. Recall that when we were using chloroquine, the southern part was not responding to chloroquine, some parts of the north were. But in totality it was thought that chloroquine were no longer effective and we changed.”

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The NMA president argued that the COVID-19 vaccines were developed under emergency and there was need to determine the response of Nigerians.

Ujah said: “Everything that is happening now is emergency. The vaccines that are being produced within nine months is emergency, otherwise vaccines production does not take within six to nine months.

“It is a process from phase 1, phase 2, phase 4, of course is the marketing, if you can say we can do this with emergency, when it is imported, we should also do our own clinical trial.”