Terawan said the vaccination program would target 67 percent of the nation’s 167 million people aged between 18 and 56 years, as recommended by the Indonesian Technical Advisory Group on Immunization.

“There will be two schemes: the [public] and private programs. The [public] scheme will be carried out by the Health Ministry and the private scheme will be rolled out by the State-Owned Enterprises [SOEs] Ministry in partnership with the Health Ministry,” he said during a hearing with House of Representatives Commission IX overseeing health care and manpower on Thursday.

The state-funded program seeks to cover 32 million people: 1.2 million medical workers, 4.4 million public service workers, including military and police personnel, and 26.4 million people from vulnerable groups. It will require 73.9 million doses, accounting for 15 percent wastage.

The private program, meanwhile, seeks to cover 75 million people, including Health Care and Social Security Agency (BPJS Kesehatan) participants and holders of other insurance policies. This will require 172.6 million doses, accounting for wastage. The vaccines are to be distributed through private healthcare facilities.

The head of the economic recovery task force, Budi Gunadi Sadikin, who is also the deputy SOEs minister, said that 10,900 state-owned and private hospitals and clinics would be participating in the private vaccination program in a way that would “not disrupt the government's program”.

Based on the ministry’s rough estimates, as many as 300 people would be vaccinated every day at each hospital and about 100 people per day at clinics. In total, the government is hoping to vaccinate 75 million people within six months.

However, an early assessment of the hospitals and clinics preparing for the program with the help of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) found that there was a gap between the capacity of healthcare facilities and the expectations placed upon them. This meant that the estimates would likely change in the future, Budi said.

“Unlike Puskesmas [community health centers], not all [private] hospitals are used to vaccination programs,” the deputy minister said during the hearing.

Private hospitals and clinics will be allowed to make frequent orders online instead of having to stockpile a large number of vaccine doses on-site, due to their generally limited cold chain infrastructure.

Budi said vaccine production and availability would be a potential bottleneck for the program.

To link the public and private vaccination schemes, Budi said, the government would launch an integrated information system on vaccine recipients and logistics dubbed COVID-19 Vaccines One Data, managed by the Communications and Information Ministry.

As the continued rise of daily COVID-19 cases shows no sign of easing, the government has pinned its hopes on vaccines.

Budi said Indonesia had firm orders of about 160 million vaccine doses, 140 million of which were manufactured by Chinese company Sinovac Biotech. The remainder were from Novavax, a United States firm.

Neither company has provided interim efficacy analysis results from the latest stages of their clinical trials.

Novavax was not even included in a ministerial decree signed by Terawan on Dec. 3, which stipulated that the vaccines to be used in the inoculation programs must be supplied by local pharmaceutical company Bio Farma or certain foreign manufacturers.

Among them are United Kingdom-based AstraZeneca, China’s Sinopharm, US-based Moderna and the US-German collaboration between Pfizer and BioNTech.

The latter two said their vaccines had over 90 percent efficacy in phase three clinical trials.

Budi said the government was still in negotiations with Pfizer and AstraZeneca to procure a further 50 million doses from each company, in addition to an expected 16 million doses from the COVAX Facility, a global COVID-19 vaccine allocation plan.

Indonesia has set aside Rp 35.1 trillion ($2.48 billion) for COVID-19 vaccine procurement and vaccination, Rp 637.3 billion of which was spent to procure 3 million doses of Sinovac’s CoronaVac vaccine and 100,000 doses of a vaccine produced by CanSino Biologics.

In total, the government has designated Rp 17 trillion for vaccine procurement, while the rest of the funds will be used to prepare the required infrastructure and equipment for the vaccination program.

During Thursday’s hearing, House lawmakers questioned the government’s decision to procure vaccines from companies that had yet to provide interim data on their efficacy, and some expressed doubts about the state’s ability to manage the data needed to carry out the vaccination program.

Some sections of the public, including health experts and medical workers, have expressed similar concerns.

Nearly 600,000 cumulative coronavirus cases and more than 18,000 deaths have been recorded, although the true scale of the outbreak could be much larger given the country’s low testing rate.

As of Thursday, just over 4 million people nationwide had been tested for COVID-19, a fraction of the population.

Unverified reports about certain private hospitals allowing people to reserve COVID-19 vaccinations went viral on social media not long after the arrival of the first batch of China’s CoronaVac vaccine in Indonesia last week.

In response, Bio Farma spokesman Bambang Heriyanto said on Sunday that the company had not yet established a scheme for people who wanted to pay for the vaccine themselves and the government had yet to regulate such a program.

Bambang said hospitals and clinics were still registering with and being verified by official associations to carry out a private vaccination scheme.

“And most importantly, the vaccination itself will have to wait for the BPOM [Food and Drug Monitoring Agency] to permit the use of the vaccines,” he said.

Health Ministry director for infection control and government spokeswoman for COVID-19 vaccine affairs Siti Nadia Tarmizi said the government had yet to decide the price of the vaccine.

“We are calling on the public to wait for the government’s official announcements on COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination," she said in a statement on Sunday.

Tonang Dwi Ardyanto of the Indonesian Hospital Association (PERSI) said regulations barred hospitals from offering services that had not been approved by the BPOM.

He urged the government to widen the coverage for free COVID-19 vaccines.

“It should be the other way around. A minimum of 70 percent of the vaccines should be provided by the government as a public good,” Tonang said.