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New vaccine arrival boosts govt readiness for 1 million vaccinations per day
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(Courtesy of the COVID-19 Response and Economic Recovery Committee)
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ational COVID-19 task force spokeswoman Siti Nadia Tarmizi has expressed optimism that the government will be ready to push for a vaccination rate of 1 million per day following the arrival of 8 million doses of bulk vaccine in the 14th batch from Sinovac Biotech Ltd on Monday.
“We can accelerate the inoculation speed, and our target to hit herd immunity status is achievable sooner,” Nadia said as quoted in a media release on Wednesday.
She added that the current vaccine supplies also enabled the government to expand vaccination targets primarily to people who are prone to contracting the virus and also those in their early 50s.
According to the latest study, she went on, both the elderly and those in their early 50s have been equally exposed to the virus and thus earned priority compared with other ages.
State-Owned Enterprises (SOE) Minister Erick Thohir, who represented the government when receiving the bulk vaccine at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport’s cargo terminal on Monday, said that currently the government possessed 81.5 million doses of bulk vaccines, including the newly arrived 8 million.
From that figure, Erick, who is also the executive director of the government’s COVID-19 Response and Economic Recovery Committee, predicted that the state-owned biopharmaceutical company PT Bio Farma, which has been assigned to produce the vaccine, could produce up to 75.9 million ready-to-use vaccines.
Before the bulk vaccine arrived, PT Bio Farma had already produced 65.5 million doses.
To date, the government has issued 26.9 million doses to be used in the first and second batch of vaccinations throughout the country.
“We are leading in terms of vaccination rates in the region. But there is more to catch up and we must consistently boost the number of vaccinations,” Erick, a former media mogul, said.
He acknowledged that despite the leading regional vaccination rate, Indonesia is still far behind bigger countries like the United States and China that have already vaccinated hundreds of thousands of their people on a daily basis.
The US, for example, has reportedly managed to get more than 70 million people vaccinated, closely followed by China in second position with more than 50 million people getting vaccinated.
Erick added that despite the vaccination status as a game changer, people were still expected to obey the health protocols, avoid crowds whenever possible, keep wearing masks and wash their hands often.
“We also expect that through the expansion and acceleration of the vaccination rate, along with people's discipline in obeying the health protocols, we can achieve an economic development rate of 4 to 5.1 percent this year,” he said.
He also added that his ministry was cooperating with five universities and two science laboratories to develop the home-produced Red and White vaccine, which is tailored to fulfil the country’s need for its own vaccines.
“We cannot continuously depend on imported vaccines. We need to develop our own whenever possible,” he said.
He then said that hopefully the final result could be presented by the end of this year or by early next year.
