Fresh reports which have been vetted by the Zamfara State government has revealed that over 1,517,119 residents of the State have received the COVID-19 vaccine.
This was disclosed by the Programme Manager, Zamfara State Health Care Board, Mustafa Aliyu while presenting a paper at a one-day workshop organised by the board for newsmen in the State on Tuesday.
He said, “853,392 people received the first dose; 555,509 received the second dose, while 107,209 people have received the booster dose.”
According to him, with this development, only 33 percent of the residents of the State have so far received the vaccine.
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Aliyu explained that public enlightenment had been going on to cover the remaining 70 percent of the people of the State before the end of September, 2022.
“We are putting on more efforts to ensure that the 70 percent of the residents of the State receive the vaccine before the end of September this year,” he noted.
The program manager urged the people to ensure that they reported to any of the COVID-19 vaccine centres in the State to receive the vaccine, which he said is free.
In another report, a committee of independent, expert advisors for the Food and Drug Administration voted overwhelmingly in favor of authorizing the two-dose Novavax COVID-19 vacine Tuesday, with 21 of 22 committee members voting in favor of the vaccine and one member abstaining.
The endorsement is only for a two-dose primary series in adults, not for boosters. The FDA is not obligated to follow the advice of its committee—the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC)—but the agency typically heeds its advice. If the FDA authorizes the vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will need to sign off on use before it becomes available.
The decision regarding the Novavax vaccine, which is already authorized in dozens of other countries, is not a straightforward one in the US. The vaccine has some advantages over currently used vaccines but has several strikes against it.
In terms of design, the vaccine follows a more traditional recipe than the two mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines or Johnson & Johnson’s adenovirus vector-based design. Both of those designs are relatively new and work by delivering genetic code for the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to our cells, which then translate the code. The Novavax vaccine, on the other hand, is a protein subunit-based vaccine that directly delivers the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to cells, along with an adjuvant—which is an additive used in vaccines to enhance immune responses to the vaccine. In this case, the adjuvant is derived from saponin compounds found in the Chilean soapbark tree, which have been used in FDA-approved vaccines previously.