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As the government searches for the best way to get the national COVID-19 vaccination program in place as soon as possible, an expert has reminded authorities to plan carefully for a successful campaign.
Indonesia plans to launch its vaccination program in the first months of next year. The government has ordered around 143 million doses of a vaccine from Chinese company Sinovac Biotech in various forms, from ready-to-administer doses to bulk vaccines, with a total of 1.2 million doses of the vaccine arriving in the country as of today. Beginning of the month.
The Food and Drug Monitoring Agency (BPOM), however, has yet to approve the distribution of the Sinovac vaccine, saying it will extend the surveillance phase of the trials for another three months to determine the vaccine’s efficacy and side effects. .
“A pandemic can turn into an endemic as long as [a country] is able to properly prepare the vaccination program in order to keep the disease under control, ”said epidemiologist Dicky Budiman, quoted by kompas.com December 19.
However, he said that organizing the vaccination campaign might not be an easy task as several factors could potentially hamper its success.
The first, Dicky continued, was the possibility of another pandemic in the future. An undetected virus that resides inside a body could reactivate in the future, for example.
“Additionally, animals could contract COVID-19 from humans and also transmit it to other animals and humans.”
Dicky also reminded the government to prepare a preventative measure against anti-vaxxers that would likely create misleading accounts to discourage the public from supporting the vaccination program. A strong communication strategy, he added, is strongly advised to anticipate such groups.
Additionally, the public continues to take the pandemic lightly due to the hoaxes and disinformation that have circulated widely on the internet. He believes this would lead to public mistrust, which could threaten the success of the vaccination program.
“[Such false claims] would make it more difficult for some of our people to accept the vaccine, ”he said.
Nonetheless, Dicky stressed that COVID-19 would not immediately end once the government rolls out the vaccines, especially as Indonesia continues to register more than 6,000 new cases per day. He suspects that if the research process had been carried out correctly, the number of new daily cases would have reached 20,000, he added.
President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo previously said on December 16 that the COVID-19 vaccine would be available free to the public, following criticism of government plans to fund vaccination for only one-third of the target population.
At this time, Jokowi has yet to provide additional details regarding the schedule for the program, as well as when the vaccines would be released. (dpk)
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