A PROFESSOR of Virology Oyewale Tomori has urged the Nigerian government to create an enabling environment for Nigerian drug firms to produce vaccines and even donate to other countries.
He spoke on Monday at the National COVID-19 Summit organised by the Presidential Steering Committee (PSC) in Abuja.
Speaking during the summit with the theme, ‘Global Health Security Threat: Repositioning to End the Pandemic and Build Back Better,’ the virologist said in contrast to the accusations of racism by the banned countries, Nigeria was only paying for ‘overlooking errors.’
He said the current generation was smarter than his own generation and if given the right environment, they could do exploits in sciences and other useful areas.
“Mr President, the generation of Nigerians we have today is much smarter than my generation. Give them one-tenth of the enabling environment opportunity which good governance gave my generation, and Nigeria will be donating vaccines to poor Europe as India is doing; Nigeria will be providing loans to China, and not the other way round,” he added.
On the travel ban by Canada and UK, Tomori said, “I woke up today to hear that Canada no longer recognises my genuine vaccination card. And Britain has clamped a travel ban on us. A few days ago, I had to know there was Omicron in Nigeria from outside. The same Canada was telling me that Nigerians who travelled out with negative COVID lab results were omicronised, before my own CDC finally tells me that we had the variant, detected in samples collected from people who recently travelled from South Africa,” he said.
“Were they people on the entourage of President Ramaphosa? They did not tell. We painfully call the reactions of the UK and Canada racism, inequity. But I say we are paying for condoning our errors of commission and overlooking our errors of omission.”
Tomori submitted that neither COVID-19 nor other diseases were Nigeria’s main enemy, noting that other issues such as lack of patriotism, self-interest, corruption and shamelessness were the dangers affecting this country.
A reporter with the ICIR
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