The National Agency for Food and
Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) says the Covishield vaccine is the
same as the Oxford AstraZeneca University (AZOU).
Mojisola Adeyeye, NAFDAC’s
director general, in a statement on Sunday, explained that Covishield is the
result of a cooperation and a technology transfer from AstraZeneca — University
of Oxford to Serum Institute of India PVT Ltd (SIIPL).
“AZOU gave the license of its
vaccine to Serum Institute of India PVT Ltd (SIIPL) to manufacture this vaccine
at a commercial scale. SIIPL is the largest vaccine manufacturer in the world
and the company got the license by signing the manufacturing agreement,” she
said.
“SIIPL gave the vaccine the trade
name COVISHIELD, it is the result of a cooperation and a technology transfer
from AstraZeneca — University of Oxford to SIIPL.
“SIIPL is now the world’s largest
vaccine manufacturer by number of doses produced and sold globally.
“More than 1.5 billion doses,
which include Polio vaccine, Diphtheria, Tetanus, Pertussis, Hib, BCG,
r-Hepatitis B, Measles, Mumps and Rubella.
“Both COVISHIELD manufactured by
Serum Institute of India Pvt Ltd and COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca manufactured
by AstraZeneca are the same vaccine – ChAdOx1 nCoV- 19 Corona Virus Vaccines
(Recombinant).”
Adeyeye added that the vaccines
manufactured by SIIPL were accredited by the World Health Organisation (WHO)
and are being used in about 170 countries in their national immunisation
programme.
On March 2, the long-awaited
COVID-19 vaccine arrived in Nigeria courtesy of the UN-led COVAX facility,
which donated 3.9 million doses to Nigeria.
Nigeria commenced its COVID-19
vaccination with frontline health workers in Abuja, on March 5 — same day the
safety of the vaccine was certified by NAFDAC.
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