Nigeria Receives MenFive Vaccine from Gavi

Nigeria Receives MenFive Vaccine from Gavi

Nigeria has turn into the primary nation to obtain the brand new MenFive vaccine from the Gavi-funded world stockpile, with a cargo delivered by UNICEF arriving within the nation.

Doses can be used to reply to an on-going meningococcus C outbreak, focusing on to vaccinate round 1,000,000 kids in six native authorities areas in Jigawa state: Babura, Birniwa, Gagarawa, Gumel, Maigatari, and Sule Tankarkar.

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance funds the worldwide stockpiles of vaccines in opposition to cholera, Ebola, meningitis and yellow fever, and helps outbreak response campaigns in lower-income international locations. Nation requests to those stockpiles are managed by the World Well being Group’s Worldwide Coordinating Group (ICG) on Vaccine Provision. The ICG has accepted the deployment of 1,043,377 doses of MenFive in response to Nigeria’s request.

The MenFive vaccine, developed by a 13-year collaboration between PATH and Serum Institute of India, with help from the UK authorities’s International, Commonwealth and Improvement Workplace, acquired WHO prequalification in July 2023. The vaccine protects in opposition to the 5 primary serogroups of meningococcal meningitis impacting Africa – meningococcal serogroups A, C, W, Y, and X. It’s the solely vaccine that protects in opposition to serogroup X.

Dr Tokunbo Oshin, Director of Excessive Impression International locations at Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance feedback on this milestone:

“With outbreaks of infectious illnesses on the rise worldwide, new improvements akin to MenFive are important in serving to us struggle again. Due to vaccines, we’ve eradicated giant and disruptive outbreaks of meningitis A in Africa: now we’ve a instrument to reply to different meningococcal meningitis serogroups that also trigger giant outbreaks leading to long-term incapacity and deaths.

Gavi can be working carefully with the Nigerian authorities in addition to our companions akin to UNICEF and WHO to help the response to this outbreak.”

This primary cargo indicators the beginning of Gavi help for a multivalent meningococcal conjugate vaccine (MMCV) program, which is able to see the MenFive vaccine rolled out by outbreak response, routine immunization, and catch-up campaigns in high-risk international locations. Over time, Gavi has labored with international locations to help vaccination in opposition to meningitis A, reaching practically 400 million kids by campaigns and routine immunisation. These efforts have helped Africa defeat meningitis A, with no new circumstances detected since 2017. The addition of MenFive into well being programs’ toolkit holds out the likelihood that the opposite circulating serogroups might additionally in the future be defeated.

As of finish 2023, the worldwide meningococcal vaccines stockpile had been accessed 62 occasions by 16 international locations since 2009, with greater than 29million doses deployed from the stockpile in help to international locations.