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Government extends shelf-life, ramps up inoculation to prevent waste of vaccines
Authorities have moved to ramp up the national vaccination drive and extend the shelf life of some COVID-19 vaccine brands in a bid to prevent millions of near-expiry vaccines from being unusable.
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A health worker prepares to give the Pfizer COVID-19 coronavirus vaccine at a makeshift clinic at the Aceh Museum in Banda Aceh on Jan. 17, 2022. (AFP/Chaideer Mahyuddin)
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uthorities have moved to ramp up the national vaccination drive and extend the shelf life of some COVID-19 vaccine brands in a bid to prevent millions of near-expired vaccines from being unusable.
The move came after Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said in February that as many as 18 million COVID-19 vaccine doses, most of which were donated to Indonesia from other countries, could expire at the end of that month.
The Food and Drug Monitoring Agency (BPOM) has authorized the extension of AstraZeneca vaccine shelf life from six months to nine months in a move that effectively prevented nearly 6 million doses of the vaccines from expiring at the end of February, Reuters reported.
Read also: Indonesia extends AstraZeneca vaccine shelf life as 6 million doses near expiry
In addition to the shelf life extension, Health Ministry spokesperson Siti Nadia Tarmizi said regional administrations had been stepping up their inoculation drives with the help of the police and the military, as well as relying on the government’s door-to-door vaccination campaign, in which health workers administer the jabs directly in people’s homes.
These moves, coupled with the latest data updates of vaccine stocks held by regional administrations, had significantly contributed to driving down the number of expired vaccines set to be disposed.
“The 18 million doses [of near-expired vaccines] were our early estimation. We have held talks with provincial and regency administrations and asked them to update [their vaccine stocks],” Siti told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.
