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About 2.2 million Nigerian children are reportedly not given one dosage of any vaccine each year, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).
The situation has reportedly rendered Nigeria the second-highest country in the world in terms of the number of zero-dose children.
At a media event on the presentation of the State of the World's infants global report on Thursday in Nigeria, Eduardo Celades, Chief of Health for UNICEF Nigeria, stated that "In the first eight weeks of delivery, 2.2 million children every year are not vaccinated at all in Nigeria."
He claimed that vaccines are an extremely effective strategy for avoiding childhood diseases and lowering child mortality, claiming that they help save the lives of more than 4.4 million kids annually.
He continued by saying that UNICEF was trying to address the zero-dose children in Nigeria in conjunction with the federal government and other partners in order to ensure that more kids receive vaccinations every year so they can fight off any sickness.
In order to reverse the situation, he stated that they planned to catch up with one million missed children in the following 700 days, noting that 1,200 wards with zero dosage children and 100 priority local government regions had been identified.
