The Federal Government has called on the British Authority to immediately rescind its ban on foreign travels from Nigeria over the discovery of cases of Omicron variant of\u00a0COVID-19 in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n
The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed made the call in Abuja on Monday at a media briefing on the decision by Britain to put Nigeria on its Red list over the discovery.<\/p>\n\n\n
The minister said the decision by the British government to put Nigeria on the red list, just because of less than two dozen cases of Omicron which did not originate in Nigeria, \u201cis unjust, unfair, punitive, indefensible and discriminatory\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n
He said the decision is also not driven by science and should be rescinded immediately.<\/p>\n\n\n
\u201cHow do you slam this kind of discriminatory action on a country of 200 million people, just because of less than two dozen cases?\u201cWhereas British citizens and residents are allowed to come in from Nigeria, non-residents from the same country are banned.\u201c<\/p>\n\n\n
The two groups are coming from the same country, but being subjected to different conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n
\u201cWhy won\u2019t Britain allow people in both categories to come in, and be subjected to the same conditions of testing and quarantine?\u201cThis is why this decision to ban travellers from Nigeria, who are neither citizens nor residents, is grossly discriminatory and punitive,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n
The minister noted that, travel ban, the type that had been slammed on some African countries, is \u201ca knee-jerk reaction that could only be detrimental to our quest to most conclusively tackle this pandemic.He said instead of a reflex responses, driven by fear, rather than science, the world should take a serious look at the issue of access to vaccines.<\/p>\n\n\n
Mohammed said access to vaccine should be based on the principles grounded in the right of every human to enjoy the highest attainable standard of health.He said such right should be without discrimination on the basis of race, religion, political belief, economic or any other social condition.<\/p>\n\n\n
\u201cMany developed countries have used the advantage of their enormous resources or relationship to sign agreements with manufacturers to supply their countries with vaccines ahead of making them available for use by other countries.\u201c<\/p>\n\n\n
Even before the clinical trials were completed, millions of doses of the most promising vaccines have been bought by Britain, US, Japan and the EU.\u201cSome of these countries bought doses five times the size of their population, while others, mostly in Africa, have little or no access to vaccines.\u201c<\/p>\n\n\n
This is the real issue to address, instead of choosing the easy path of travel bans, which the UN Secretary General called Travel Apartheid. Let the world know that no one is safe until everyone is safe,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n
Mohammed said Nigeria had handled the COVID-19 pandemic with utmost responsibility, based on science, and rightly earned global accolades.He said the country, therefore, did not deserve to be put on any country\u2019s red list.<\/p>\n\n\n
By NAN<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Federal Government has called on the British Authority to immediately rescind its ban on foreign travels from Nigeria over the discovery of cases of Omicron variant of\u00a0COVID-19 in the country. The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed made the call in Abuja on Monday at a media briefing on the decision by Britain to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":33278,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5773],"tags":[4305,236,4267],"class_list":["post-37321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-britain","tag-lai","tag-omicron"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37321\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}