Senators and members of the House of Representatives from Kogi State have said they are not sure they will volunteer to get the COVID-19 vaccines.
The Senate President, Ahmad Lawan had announced a two-week schedule for senators to get vaccinated as part of efforts to boost pubic confidence in the vaccines.
The Kogi State Governor, Yahaya Bello, had also said he won’t receive the vaccine even as his colleagues are expected to receive shots of the AstraZeneca/Oxford COVID-19 vaccines in the coming days – and the state is the ony state in the country yet to receive delivery of the vaccine.
The Punch Newspaper reports that, the Kogi State senators led by Smart Adeyemi, the leader of the Kogi lawmakers’ forum in the National Assembly said that the federal legislators from the state were yet to reach a consensus on the vaccine.
Adeyemi added that the 12 National Assembly members from the state might take the vaccines as a form of protection because of their frequency of visits to Abuja.
The senator said, “The Kogi State legislators in the National Assembly have not thought of taking the vaccines yet, but if ever we will take it at all, it is because we are in Abuja where there is COVID-19 but there is no COVID in our state.”
He further said the senators were in support of the Yahaya Bello, the state governor’s insistence that there is no COVID-19 in the state.
“I don’t know the magic in Kogi State because the coronavirus is not killing our people. If it is leading to deaths in the state, I would be the first person to cry out and disagree with our governor but our people are not dying and they are not falling ill,” he said.
“I agree with our governor that there is no COVID-19 in Kogi State. If the disease is there, people would have been dying. It appears COVID-19 is afraid of the Kogi people. To a large extent, we are convinced that our governor knows what he is doing and saying.”
Concluding, he said even the Ministry of Health officials told him they did not know what was preventing COVID-19 from causing casualties in the state.
“We cannot be killing our people just to justify that the disease is real. We are not just saying yes to our governor but we are also saying yes to him because nobody has died of the disease.
“We cannot disagree with our governor. How do we disagree with a man who maintains a position and stands by it and you don’t have any contrary fact to fault him? Our people are not dying and we should not be hypocritical about it.
“Governor Bello is a highly courageous person. He takes a position the moment he knows what he is doing is in the best interest of the people. If our people are dying, we would have spoken against it,” Adeyemi said.
