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JAKARTA (BLOOMBERG) – Indonesia seeks to vaccinate 160 million people against the coronavirus by the end of next year, an ambitious plan targeting more than half the population of a nation made up of thousands of separate islands.
The government will focus its efforts on vaccinating workers in the fourth most populous country in the world.
The plan prioritizes people aged 19 to 59, who make up 70 percent of Indonesia’s 268 million population, as well as people on the front lines of the pandemic, such as healthcare workers. , police and military officers, Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Airlangga Hartarto said in a briefing on Friday (October 2).
Indonesia’s economy is forecast to contract for the first time since the Asian financial crisis more than two decades ago, as the country faces infections that have recently risen to about 4,000 a day.
The nation is conducting final-stage clinical trials of a vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech, while Jakarta-based PT Kalbe Farma is working with South Korea’s Genexine on another candidate.
Distributing and administering vaccines after approval will require considerable effort in the largest archipelago in the world.
It will involve more than 2,900 public and private hospitals, as well as more than 10,000 community health clinics, known as Puskesmas, Hartarto said.
While the law requires that each district must have at least one Puskesmas to provide basic health care, that is not always the case in rural areas.
West Papua has just 0.73 clinics for each district, compared to 7.3 in Jakarta, according to data from the Health Ministry.
Overall, Indonesia needs up to 370 million doses of vaccines to achieve its goal, and the first stage of 36 million is expected to ship in the fourth quarter of this year, Hartarto said.
The government is working on a more detailed roadmap with a presidential decree to be issued on the vaccination technique, he added.
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