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Indonesia allows emergency use of Sinovac vaccine
Southeast Asia's largest economy becomes the first country outside China to issue the emergency approval for Sinovac vaccine, with President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo scheduled to receive the first shot on Wednesday.
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Workers unload containers carrying the Sinovac vaccine for COVID-19 under National Police security at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Tangerang, Banten, on Dec. 31, 2020. As many as 1.8 million doses of Chinese firm Sinovac Biotech's COVID-19 vaccine, CoronaVac, arrived in Indonesia as the government eyes to roll out vaccination for medical workers in January. (Antara/Muhammad Iqbal)
T
he Food and Drug Monitoring Agency (BPOM) has issued an emergency use authorization for Chinese firm Sinovac Biotech's COVID-19 vaccine after interim results of its late-stage trials in the country showed an efficacy rate of 65.3 percent.
This makes Indonesia the first country outside China to issue the emergency approval for the vaccine named CoronaVac, with President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo scheduled to receive the first shot on Jan. 13. Around 1.3 million health workers are expected to follow suit in the first few months of the free vaccination program.
The efficacy rate was derived from interim results after three months of monitoring in a six-month trial in Bandung, West Java, BPOM head Penny K. Lukito said on Monday. The figure is lower than rates of 91.25 percent and 78 percent, respectively, reported by Turkish and Brazilian authorities, which Penny said had also been taken into account by the agency when greenlighting the vaccine for emergency use.
While it is also lower than those of other vaccines already put into emergency use abroad, such as of American firms Pfizer’s and Moderna at above 90 percent, it is still higher than the World Health Organization’s minimum efficacy rate of 50 percent to be eligible for emergency approval.
Read also: Indonesia on track for Jan. 13 vaccination drive
Twenty-five individuals from a total of 1,600 subjects involved in the Bandung trial caught the disease, BPOM spokesperson Lucia Rizki Andalusia said.
The agency, however, did not disclose how many of these subjects had actually received the vaccine as opposed to the placebo, the kind of information commonly provided by other vaccine producers and used to estimate efficacy.
