FRIDAY, 22nd October, 2021: The Country Manager Nigeria and Cluster Lead West Africa for Pfizer, Mr. Olayinka Subair has stated that Nigeria has no technical capacity to develop a COVID-19 vaccine at the moment.
He said this on Thursday in the Magboro area of Ogun State.
 He described vaccine development as a long and technical process with high underlying costs.
He was quoted to have said, "Vaccine development takes, on average, about 12 years. From discovery to experiments and trials, COVID-19 was an exceptional one as it was a global pandemic that needed a quick solution. At Pfizer, for example, most of the processes were done in parallel. Normally, the processes are meant to be done in sequence.
“Because we had already synthesised the vaccine already, we just scaled up from there. Whether Nigeria will be able to do a vaccine for a new disease, it will be very difficult. There are conventional diseases that their vaccines are just generic, like polio, measles and others.”
He added, “But the technology transfer for a disease like COVID-19 that is mutating fast – and there are still so many studies going on around the virus – will take a lot of time.
“We do not have the technical competence or the capacity to develop a COVID-19 vaccine locally yet. For generic diseases like polio or measles, we can take up the end-stage manufacturing for them, but COVID-19 is still largely out of our reach for now.”
According to Subair, the cost of researching and developing a COVID-19 vaccine is over $3bn.
He advised that the government should look into a partnership with the manufacturers of the recently announced malaria vaccine.