LIVING THE NEW NORMAL: Legal & Ethical Issues around Covid-19 Passports and What it means for Nigeria

There is simply no area of life that the the Covid-19 pandemic has not upended, whether in terms of human interaction, business and social life as countries have been forced into response policies ranging from lockdowns to limitations on physical gatherings, businesses have been made to adopt new approaches while reeling from the shock of the pandemic, economies and markets are still grappling with receding fortunes and people the world over coming to terms with the new look of everyday life in the face of compelled restrictions in movement and interaction.

Nigeria is one of the 210 countries affected by the Covid-19 virus globally, with its first case confirmed in Lagos State on February 27, 2020. In Nigeria, as in most parts of the world, Covid-19 continues to be a concern, especially with the new variants of the virus which have been said to be mutated versions of the earlier version of the virus and are thought to spread faster from person to person, having been recorded in Nigeria and with fresh cases of Covid-19 infections ramping up in the numbers as the days go by.

To mitigate the mounting burden of COVID-19, vaccine development has occurred at an unprecedented pace.

As of December 31, 2020, safety and efficacy results for a number of vaccines were reported , and as of today, the following vaccines have been granted Emergency Use Listing by the World Health Organisation (WHO), AstraZeneca/Oxford, Johnson and Johnson, Moderna, Pfizer/BionTech, Sinopharm, and Sinovac. Globally, as of 25 July 2021, a total of 3,646,968,156 vaccine doses have been administered.

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