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JAKARTA (Reuters) – Indonesia has requested emergency authorization to start a mass vaccination campaign before the end of the year to combat the coronavirus in the archipelago, the president of the Southeast Asian nation said on Friday.
In an interview with Reuters, President Joko Widodo, commonly known as Jokowi, said that plans had already been advanced to distribute the vaccine across the country.
If approval is granted by the country’s food and drug agency, known by its Indonesian acronym BPOM, it will mean that Indonesia, with 270 million people, the fourth most populous country in the world, will be among the first in the world to implement a coronavirus vaccine.
“We hope to begin the vaccination process later this year after a series of tests conducted by BPOM,” Jokowi said.
Indonesia has struggled to suppress the coronavirus for months, but the steady rise in infection rates has stalled in recent weeks, according to official figures.
The country has the highest number of coronavirus cases in Southeast Asia with around 15,000 deaths and 450,000 infections, although health experts caution that those numbers are likely higher due to low rates of testing.
“We will push the cases to stay flat and then we will attack him with vaccines,” Jokowi told Reuters at the presidential palace.
On Friday afternoon, after the Reuters interview with Jokowi, Indonesia recorded a daily record number of infections of 5,444, well above the daily average of fewer than 3,500 cases for the past two weeks.
Jokowi added that ensuring vaccine safety was a priority and that health workers, the police and the military would be first in line when the vaccination campaign begins.
At a ministerial round table after Jokowi’s interview, the coordinating minister for Maritime Affairs and Investments, Luhut Pandjaitan, said that the government expects the approval of the BPOM in the first week of December and that Indonesia will “start vaccinating” two weeks later. .
The vaccines produced by Sinovac and Sinopharm of China are expected to be used in the early stages of the campaign. This year, the companies will provide 18 million vaccines, including 15 million that will be manufactured by Indonesia’s state pharmaceutical company Bio Farma.
In total, Indonesia has deals for more than 250 million doses until the end of 2021. This includes 30 million produced by the US company Novavax, the coordinating economy minister, Airlangga Hartarto told Reuters.
ECONOMIC BOOST
Over the past two quarters, Indonesia’s economy has contracted at a slower rate than other countries in the region, and Jokowi said the economic trend was “encouraging.”
“Hopefully this (vaccination campaign) will have a positive economic impact. This is very important to us.”
He said the passage of a huge job creation bill that simplified 79 existing laws to boost investment, stimulate business activity and boost employment was a “major structural reform” that would add more impetus to the economy.
The implementation of the reform package, known as the Omnibus law, will be completed by the end of the year, Jokowi said.
When the bill was passed, there were widespread protests from workers, students and environmentalists, and several unions have challenged the law in the Constitutional Court.
Such activism is normal in a democracy, the president said, adding that he was not concerned about requests for judicial review against the new law.
The protests have petered out in recent weeks and Jokowi said the government has reached out to unions and large Islamic organizations to convince them of the benefits of the Omnibus laws.
“The Indonesian government is firmly committed to carrying out structural reforms and accelerating economic transformation … through the enactment of the job creation law,” he said.
(Reporting by Tom Allard, Stanley Widianto, and Gayatri Suroyo; Editing by Sam Holmes)
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