Every year, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), around 2.2 million Nigerian children do not receive even one dosage of any vaccine.
Nigeria is now the second-highest country in the world in terms of the number of zero-dose children, the research claims.
At a media event on Thursday in Nigeria to coincide with the release of the State of the World’s infants worldwide report, UNICEF Nigeria’s Chief of Health, Eduardo Celades, stated that “In the first eight weeks of delivery, 2.2 million children every year are not vaccinated at all in Nigeria.”
In his opinion, vaccinations are a very effective technique for avoiding childhood illnesses and lowering child mortality; he claims that each year, more than 4.4 million children are saved thanks to vaccines.
He continued by saying that UNICEF was addressing the zero-dose children in Nigeria by working with the federal government and other parties to increase the number of children who receive vaccinations each year so that they can fight off any disease.
He reaffirmed their goal of catching up with one million missed children in the following 700 days, noting that 1,200 wards with zero dose children and 100 priority local government districts had been chosen in order to reverse the situation.