Ensure mandatory vaccination does not breach rights of Nigerians: Experts urge FG
The Nigerian Infectious Diseases Society, NIDS, has said that decisions on health especially on COVID-19 response should be an informed decision based on local evidence and not a copy and paste approach where what is being done in Europe and American will be implemented in the country.
The Infectious disease experts urged the federal government to ensure that its mandatory vaccination drive does not breach the fundamental rights of Nigerians.
While speaking at the 9th Annual General Meeting and Scientific Conference (AGSM) of the Nigerian Infectious Diseases Society (NIDS) in Lagos, the President of NIDS, Prof Dimie Ogoina noted that although Nigeria is currently launching a massive vaccination drive which is commendable there was the need for the government to invest in health and health security.
He said instead of compelling people to take vaccines it was necessary to intensify awareness of COVID-19 vaccines.
“The society and even government have the responsibility to generate local evidence that will inform all our decisions and strategy. There is also a challenge of vaccine hesitancy and rejections among the populace. We believe that government and everybody must improve the awareness on the benefit of vaccination before we get to the point of mandatory vaccination.
“There is a need to intensify awareness creation, advocacy on the benefit of vaccination because there is a lot of myths and misconceptions out there. We must all collectively help to dispel them,” he insisted.
Ogoina added that mandatory vaccination is an option that is available to all governments but the government has a responsibility to protect the health of the populace if there is a situation where the actions and inactions of certain persons will expose others to certain diseases.
He said, “Government has a responsibility to take action but mandatory vaccination is like the extreme to promote the acceptance of any public intervention. Government should ensure that everybody is aware of the benefits of vaccination and fully aware of the side effects of vaccination. Awareness creation should be done in states, federal and at the local level. If that is done, then there is an option for mandatory vaccination but should be done in such a way that it does not breach the fundamental rights of everybody and that is what we are saying.”
The Professor of Medicine and Infectious Disease at the Niger Delta University, also noted that the pandemic has revealed the need to invest in the public health system because over time the public health system has been neglected.
“Another lesson is to invest in our laboratory capacity. When we started the response we had only 4 laboratories to diagnose COVID. Currently, we have laboratories in every state. “Other lessons we learnt, is to improve our public health workforce. We have situations where we pay people to volunteer to care for COVID-19 patients. That should not be. We should motivate them to do the job, have compensation and life insurance not necessarily to pay them to do the job.
“We need to improve the number of our public health workforce so that when we have an outbreak, we will know that there are certain people who are dedicated to doing so. And their primary responsibility is to respond to a public health threat.” He stated.
