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Latest Sinovac shipment to add 85 million doses to Indonesia's vaccine supply
Prefacing his announcement that Indonesia now has 105 million vaccine bulk units after the latest shipment arrived on Wednesday, the health minister cautioned that rigorously following the health protocols was still needed whether people had been vaccinated or not.
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A worker transports containers of Sinovac vaccine bulk on June 27, 2021 at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Tangerang, Banten. (Courtesy of KPC PEN)
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Significantly, the minister started his briefing by saying that being vaccinated did not give people 100 percent immunity to the coronavirus. Instead, the COVID-19 vaccines worked to cushion symptoms of the disease and reduce deaths and hospitalizations by increasing the body’s immune response.
He stressed that a person who had been vaccinated could “still contract the virus and transmit it. We therefore need to keep observing the health protocols”.
Budi said the latest shipment would be sent directly to state-owned pharmaceutical company PT Bio Farma in Bandung, West Java, where it would be processed into 85 million doses of ready-to-use COVID-19 vaccine by early August.
He added that Indonesia was expecting more vaccine shipments soon, including through the Gavi COVAX Facility for equitable global vaccine access and distribution. Shipments of the AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were also scheduled to arrive in July and August, respectively.
“With the increased vaccine supply, the government will continue to ramp up the vaccination drive,” Budi told the press briefing.
The government is looking to fast-track its nationwide inoculation drive amid the current surge in COVID-19 infections across Java, thought to be driven by more contagious variants of SARS-CoV-2.
President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo has called on health authorities to administer 1 million vaccine doses per day throughout July and increase daily doses to 2 million in August in order to meet the government’s vaccination target.
Budi estimated that some 181.5 million of 269 million Indonesians would have gotten at least one of their two COVID-19 vaccine jabs by the end of the year.
The figure amounts to 70 percent of the population, the government benchmark for achieving the fabled “herd immunity" against the disease, which is still under study by the global scientific community.
