TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Vaccine doubts point to shortcomings in government's COVID-19 message
Change Size
A vaccine from Sinovac arrives at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on Sunday. (Youtube/Setpres)
T
he arrival of the first batch of China's CoronaVac vaccine in Indonesia, a country struggling to contain the COVID-19 outbreak, has brought as much caution as it has hope, with medical workers – the priority group for vaccination – still questioning its efficacy and safety.
After breaking several records for daily COVID-19 cases and fatalities in recent weeks, Indonesia received 1.2 million doses of the candidate vaccine from Chinese biopharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech in the late hours of Sunday.
The COVID-19 handling and national economic recovery committee soon shared the news on its social media channels by uploading a picture of a kid jumping with the caption: "Vaccines have arrived, I am happy.”
But the sentiment was not shared by the entire public, including some members of the medical community who have been promised by the government to be among the first people to get vaccinated.
On social media, questions about the vaccine's efficacy and safety emerged as netizens pointed to an absence of data on it. Other vaccines have disclosed their efficacy claims from ongoing final-stage clinical trials.
Internet personality and medical school graduate Tirta Hudhi aka dr. Tirta expressed his concern over the efficacy and safety of the vaccine. In a Twitter post of his that has been retweeted over 100 times, he asked officials to get vaccinated before medical workers.
A doctor working at a COVID-19 referral hospital in Jakarta who asked to be identified only as Robby said that he expected medical workers to be administered only with vaccines that had evident reports of efficacy, rather than ending up with “a pig in a poke”.
