World News | UK Donates 592K COVID Vaccine Doses to Nigeria

Lagos (Nigeria), Aug 27 (AP) The U.K. has donated additional 592,880 doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine to Nigeria, the British High Commission in Abuja has said, raising the total number of the vaccine doses it has shared with Africa's most populous country in August to 1,292,640.

The doses, which are part of the 100 million the U.K. has promised to donate to the rest of the world by June 2022, will be a boost for the West African nation where some hundreds of thousands who received the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine are still awaiting the second shot.

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Acting British High Commissioner to Nigeria Gill Atkinson said the new supplies will help Nigeria meet its “urgent need for vaccines” for a population of more than 200 million out of which less than 1% have been fully vaccinated, according to Africa CDC.

Nigeria began the second phase of COVID-19 vaccination last week, but it has only been able to administer nearly 4 million doses so far, Africa CDC data shows.

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The country continues to see an infection surge mainly driven by the Delta variant. Confirmed cases hit a record 25-week high in the second week of August, and over 70 percent of those cases were from the country's commercial capital Lagos. (AP)

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)