Consumer Safety: NAFDAC’s strategy to reduce importation, tackle counterfeit drugs by 2025 ─Adeyeye

*The health regulatory agency says NAFDAC is poised to change the current 70 percent importation of drugs to 30 percent by 2025 to attain drug security, while giving vital assurance on expired COVID-19 Vaccines in the country

Alexander Davis | ConsumerConnect

Nigeria’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control has disclosed that the country is making efforts at increasing local drug manufacturing in order to help curb the prevalence of fake, substandard drugs, and ensure drug security in the country.

Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, Director-General of the health body, who stated this development Wednesday, December 29, 2021, in Lagos, noted that NAFDAC is working on reducing the importation of drugs from the current 70 percent to 30 percent by 2025, agency report said.

Federal Government destroys 1million expired doses of AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccines in Abuja, FCT

The NAFDAC Director-General said that this feat could be achieved through increased local manufacturing of drugs.

Adeyeye stated: “We are using multifaceted approaches to curb substandard and falsified medicine in the country.

“If a country is over-dependent on importation of medicine, such country will get substandard drugs and if not for COVID-19, we wouldn’t have woken up from our slumber as a country.”

She also noted: “When I started my tenure, local manufacturing of medicine became my focus because when you increase local manufacturing you are not just giving more jobs or increasing the GDP.

“Most, importantly, you are safeguarding the health of the nation because if somebody is falsifying something on Ota, for example, we can get there within one hour and something like that had happened before.”

According to Prof. Adeyeye, “we want to change the 70 cent importation of drugs into the country to 30 percent by 2025, so that as a nation we can say we have drug security because we don’t have that now.

“A country that is not drug secure is not secured in other facets”.

The agency, she stated, has also tightened the belt around shipment of drugs into the country.

“We have read our riot act to drugs manufacturers who bring their drugs to the country if they want to be friends in trade with Nigeria.

“If they want to be friends with us, they should do what we want and not send what will kill our people and that is why we have tightened shipment of drugs into the country,” Adeyeye declared.

She added: “We have been to China and India and now we deal with the lab directly not the agents like what it used to be before.”

We’are giving vital assurance on expired COVID-19 Vaccines: NAFDAC DG

In a related development, Prof. Adeyeye has disclosed that the health regulatory agency is working also with international partners to ensure Nigeria gets COVID-19 Vaccines with long expiration dates.

Adeyeye was quoted to have spoken against the backdrop of the one million doses of vaccines that expired November 2021, and were destroyed in Abuja by NAFDAC.

The Director-General said that expired COVID-19 Vaccines had very short expiration dates which made it impossible to be administered on consumers in time due to logistical reasons.

Adeyeye said: “When developed countries started using the vaccine for many months, we didn’t have access to them until we started receiving donations, not just through COVAX alone but from some countries also.

“The expiration date was shorter than what it was supposed to be and between the time we tested and start using it, there was not enough time and that was the only reason not because we were careless.”

However, going forward, she assured that the agency is working with international partners to ensure the expiration date of any vaccines Nigeria will be receiving are up to five or six months.

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