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JAKARTA – The national distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine that was developed by the Chinese firm Sinovac Biotech began on Sunday (January 3).
Mass inoculations are scheduled to begin later this month.
The distribution exercise comes after Indonesia’s state-owned vaccine producer Bio Farma received 1.2 million doses of the vaccine on December 6 and 1.8 million doses on December 31.
Bio Farma began distributing the Sinovac vaccine to health facilities in the country’s 34 provinces on Sunday, said the company’s Covid-19 vaccination spokesperson, Bambang Heriyanto.
He added that the necessary storage facilities had been prepared to maintain the vaccine doses.
“All the cold chain facilities (for vaccines) between 2 degrees C and 8 degrees C are ready. Hopefully that will help ensure the quality of the vaccines that will be used for people, ”he told a news conference.
Mr. Bambang said that Indonesia has carried out a number of national vaccination programs in the past, so infrastructure would not be a problem.
Indonesia, which is currently struggling to control the worst coronavirus outbreak in Southeast Asia, plans to inoculate 181.5 million people over the age of 18, or about 67% of its nearly 270 million people, within 15 months. .
The vaccines will be administered first to its 1.3 million health workers. Another 17.4 million frontline workers will be vaccinated afterward, and then 21.5 million people 60 and older will receive the vaccine between January and April.
In the second phase, scheduled for April this year and March 2022, 63.9 million people will be vaccinated in high-risk areas, followed by the remaining 77.4 million of the target population.
At the same press conference, the Ministry of Health’s Covid-19 vaccination spokesperson, Dr. Siti Nadia Tarmizi, said that clinical trials of the Sinovac vaccine in Turkey and Brazil yielded what she described as “pretty good” results. , as is the third phase in progress. of the clinical trial in Indonesia.
The latter paved the way for the national vaccination program to run as scheduled.
“We are quite optimistic that (the program) will stick to our schedule and we will be able to start vaccinations in the second or third week of January 2021,” said Dr. Nadia.
Interim data from a late-stage trial in Turkey showed that the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Sinovac is 91.2 percent effective, while a similar trial in Brazil revealed that the injection was more than 50 percent effective.
Indonesia’s vaccination program is subject to approval by the BPOM drug control agency, which is prepared to grant an emergency use authorization for the use of Sinovac vaccine.
Dr. Nadia said that the program will be carried out by around 2,500 hospitals, 13,000 community health centers and 49 port health authorities throughout the country. It will have the support of some 30,000 vaccinators.
So far, Indonesia has sourced nearly 330 million doses from five different suppliers, including Sinovac, AstraZeneca, and Novavax, with the possibility of sourcing millions more from them if necessary.
The fourth most populous nation in the world has reported 765,350 Covid-19 infections and 22,734 deaths as of Sunday. Its positivity rate is around 30 percent, much higher than the World Health Organization’s recommended positive rate of 5 percent or less, a general benchmark for proper testing.
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