The World Health Organizations’ “Situation Report 15” says the threshold for Indonesia’s positivity rate should be below 5 percent.  However, some provinces have a positivity rate of between 15 and 25 percent. Immediate measures are needed to curb the very aggressive SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Indonesia, like many other countries, is struggling to develop a vaccine for this new coronavirus. The development of vaccines usually takes a long time. The longer the delay, the more victims COVID-19 will claim.

Science magazine published an article by Peter Chumakov et al titled “Can Existing Live Vaccines Prevent COVID-19?” (science.sciencemag.org). The vaccine that the article referred to is OPV.

OPV, which is a live attenuated vaccine, was developed in the 1950s. Since then, it has been used to prevent a poliomyelitis outbreak. OPV immunization induces a long-lasting antibody response to the polio virus. With time, several experiments revealed that OPV has some positive side effects, protecting children from diseases caused by other viruses and bacteria.

As cited by Chumakov et al, a clinical trial in Guinea Bissau, for instance, showed that OPV given at birth reduced infant mortality by 32 percent. Repeated OPV immunization in this country, in the absence of a circulating poliovirus, reduced all-cause mortality at the range of 16 to 19 percent. This means that OPV can prevent diseases from unrelated pathogens (pathogens other than polio).

Clinical trials conducted in Russia in the 1970s involving more than 60,000 individuals showed that OPV was effective against influenza. It reduced morbidity by 3.8-fold on average.

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