The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Nigeria has launched a song tagged, “No More Zero-Dose” to commemorate the 2024 World Polio Day. The event which held in Lagos had a vast array of guests in attendance including A-list artistes.
Speaking at the event, Dr. Tunji Funso of Rotary International spoke to the importance of vaccination for all children.
He said “As far as World Polio Day is concerned, our concern is to ensure that every mother or every caregiver appreciates the need to have their children immunized, not only against polio but also against all childhood preventable diseases. Polio is paramount for us as Rotary. Rotary started the quest to get rid of polio from the world.
What we have been doing before the last 50 years was just to keep it at bay but keep immunizing children. This effort is actually to eradicate polio so we get to a point where you don’t need to give children the polio vaccine any more and that is the aim and we have come a long way. We started from polio ravaging 125 countries to now having just two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nigeria was certified wide polio virus free in 2020.”
Dr. Eduardo Celades, the Chief of Health UNICEF Nigeria, while speaking to Radio Now’s Sarah Owoka spoke about their experiences working in Nigeria.
He said “Right, in our work, we are noticing that there is a growing vaccine hesitance, that the vaccine acceptance is going down in some places, but as well not always. It’s not always that we have bad news, we have some good news, right? So, just to let you know, this year we vaccinated 12 million girls against HPV, like papillomavirus vaccine, right? So, we still see a lot of acceptance in Nigeria, however, in some places, we are seeing some resistance. Sometimes, it’s a soft resistance, let’s say, that a campaign is happening, you should be, I mean, you know that the vaccinators are coming in the morning, they arrive to your house, and no one is around, right? So, these cases are easy to solve.”
“What we do normally is we try to come back in the evening, maybe. It’s just that people are not interested, but if you put them easy, it happens. Other cases are more like hard resistance, right? For many reasons. Some of them because of religious reasons, or maybe because of misinformation, distrust, or disinformation. So, that’s the difficult ones to change.
On his part, the UNICEF Chief of Communication, Advocacy and Partnerships, Rajat Madhok, spoke to the reason behind the song produced by UNICEF. He said “What we’re having here is a group of 12 fantastic artists, artists in their own right, whether from the music industry or actors from Nollywood, Kannywood, or celebrities from Western, Central Africa, who’ve come together and produced a song called No More Zero Dose. And the meaning behind the song is that there should be not a single child that’s left without a dose of vaccination. We cannot have children that do not get vaccinated. And unfortunately, Nigeria, for example, has 2.1 million children who’ve not been vaccinated even once. What that means is these children who are not vaccinated are vulnerable. They are prone to getting diseases that can otherwise be prevented if you’ve got a jab.”
Leave feedback about this
You must be logged in to post a comment.