Indonesia continues to push its COVID-19 vaccination program forward, with more than 500,000 healthcare workers already inoculated against the virus. Meanwhile, progress continues to be made with the locally-made 鈥淩ed-and-White" vaccine, with its clinical trial expected to start in the second half of 2021.
As of February 2, 2021, as many as 596,260 people, mainly healthcare workers and critical government officials, have been vaccinated for COVID-19 for the first phase of the Indonesian Vaccination program. Meanwhile, the second phase of the program 鈥� which is done concurrently with phase 1 but is targeting the general citizen 鈥� has succeeded in covering 51,999 people. This means that Indonesia has vaccinated around a third of the 1.5 million healthcare workers targeted for inoculation by the end of the first quarter of 2021. The country aims to protect 181.5 million Indonesians from COVID-19 by the end of the program.
The vaccine from China-based Biopharmaceutical company SinoVac has been critical to this plan. Indonesia has thus far received over 4 million dosages of ready-to-use SinoVac vaccines as well as
25 million COVID-19 vaccine ingredients from the company. Indonesia, via state-owned company PT Bio Farma, has been running a local production line of the vaccine using the imported ingredient from SinoVac. The company aims to produce 13 million dosages of vaccines from the first few batches by February 11. The next batch to be produced from the shipment that arrived on February 2 is expected to be ready for distribution by March 20, 2021.
Indonesia ordered a total of 140 million dosages of COVID-19 vaccines from SinoVac, the delivery of which is scheduled to complete by the middle of this year. That number is not enough to meet the inoculation target of 181.5 million people. Therefore, the country has further secured 50 million dosages of the German-made Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine while also working to secure 100 million dosages of the UK-made Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
Additionally, the country is also working to produce its own line of COVID-19 vaccines using the strain that is spreading in Indonesia. Spearheaded by the Eijkman Institute of Molecular Biology with the cooperation of several Indonesian universities and research institutions, the vaccine is made not by using the deactivated virus, but by using its recombined proteins to produce a vaccine with fewer side-effects. This 鈥淩ed-and-White" vaccine is expected to enter clinical trial by mid-2021.