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JAKARTA – Indonesian President Joko Widodo took the country’s first Covid-19 hit on Wednesday, when the sprawling archipelago of nearly 270 million people launched a mass vaccination campaign to suppress rising case rates.
The 59-year-old leader, better known as Jokowi, was inoculated on live television at the Jakarta state palace along with his health minister and several senior officials, as well as business and religious leaders.
“I’m not sorry at all,” he laughed after receiving a dose of the China-developed CoronaVac, the first of two needed.
“This vaccine is important in breaking the chain of coronavirus infections and providing health protection for all of us, and safety and security for all Indonesians,” Jokowi told reporters, adding that “it would also help accelerate the economic recovery.” .
National regulators had this week approved the CoronaVac injection, produced by Sinovac, announcing that its effectiveness was 65.3 percent, according to tests carried out in Indonesia.
Tests in the worst affected Brazil showed that the Sinovac jab was very effective in preventing moderate to severe virus cases. But overall, it was only 50 percent effective in preventing patients from contracting the disease.
While the vaccine has reached the 50 percent minimum efficacy target set by the World Health Organization, it lags far behind the vaccines developed by Moderna at 94 percent and Pfizer-BioNTech at 95 percent.
This week, Indonesia’s main Muslim-majority religious body also approved the vaccine as halal, meaning permissible under Islam, in a move that could help convince cautious citizens.
Past vaccination campaigns have encountered resistance among some segments of the country’s huge population, the fourth largest in the world.
Health workers and other groups at risk will be prioritized under an ambitious plan to vaccinate nearly 182 million people over the next 15 months.
The Southeast Asian nation has also signed deals for nearly 330 million vaccine doses from a number of pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Chinese suppliers such as Sinopharm.
Indonesia has reported nearly 850,000 Covid-19 cases and close to 25,000 deaths, but low testing rates mean the public health crisis is believed to be much larger than the figures suggest.
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