COVID 19: FG Mulls Supplementary Budget To Cater For Vaccines

Minister of Finance, Budget, and National Planning, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed, has said that there is no provision in the 2021 Budget to fund the acquisition of COVID-19 vaccines.

To this effect, the Federal government expressed the commitment of the National Assembly to provide a supplementary budget for additional spending on COVID-19 vaccines, if needed.

The minister made this known during a virtual presentation of the 2021 Budget in Abuja while highlighting that the federal government is working on the type and quantity of COVID-19 vaccines to procure, while her ministry and the Ministry of Health will meet to finalise an amount to be allocated to vaccine procurement within the next two weeks.

“We agreed that the effort needed to be done so that we have clarity as to whether the provisions in the budget will be adequate or we have to make additional provisions by way of a special supplementary budget to make more provisions for COVID-19 vaccinations,” Ahmed said.

Recall that Nigeria is expected to receive about 100,000 doses of the Pfizer and BioNTech approved COVID-19 vaccines by the end of January.

In addition, the country, under phase two of its COVID-19 vaccination scheme, will get 42 million extra doses of vaccines through the COVAX facility.

The federal government is targeting to vaccinate about 40 per cent of Nigeria’s population in 2021.