The Yaba Vaccine Laboratory began producing yellow-fever vaccine in 1942 under the colonial Medical Research Institute, on the basis of the 17D vaccine strain developed at the Rockefeller Foundation by Max Theiler (Nobel Prize 1951). The production was egg-passage based — fertilised hen's eggs inoculated with the 17D strain, harvested, and lyophilised under the local conditions of Yaba.
After independence, Nigerian virologists at Yaba (including A. B. O. Oyediran, later a UI Vice-Chancellor, and the team around the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research founding generation) ran the production. Output peaked in the 1970s at roughly 2–3 million doses a year, sufficient for Nigerian and substantial West African demand.
Production ceased between 1988 and 1991, against the background of the SAP-era collapse of the federal medical-supplies capital budget. The country became, and remains, an importer of yellow-fever vaccine — through UNICEF supply for the WHO Expanded Programme on Immunization and through direct procurement from Sanofi (France), Bio-Manguinhos (Brazil) and the Institut Pasteur de Dakar (Senegal).
The Yaba site is part of the Biovaccines Nigeria Limited public-private joint venture (May & Baker + Federal Government), announced in 2017 as the vehicle for resumed Nigerian vaccine production. As of 2026, no Nigerian-made vaccine — yellow fever or otherwise — has resumed commercial output.
It is the catalogue's most direct example of an institutional capability that simply went out — not from a failure to make the science work, but from a failure to maintain a forty-year-old working facility.