Indonesia announced plans to give COVID-19 vaccine for adults of working age before the elderly. While the US is prioritizing vaccines for Health professionals and the elderly, Indonesia has a reason to vaccinate young people first.
The goal is to achieve collective immunity and revive the economy by vaccinating workers after health workers and frontline civil servants, reports Reuters.
Indonesia is using a vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech. The country will also receive shipments of the Pfizer vaccine and AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford later this year, according to Reuters.
Regarding the choice of vaccinating young adults before the elderly, Peter Collignon, professor of infectious diseases at Australian National University, told Reuters that Indonesia’s strategy may slow the spread of COVID-19, but may not affect mortality rates.
“Indonesia doing differently from the US and Europe is important, because it will tell us (if) you will see a more dramatic effect in Indonesia than in Europe or the US, because of the strategy they are doing,” he said, adding, ” I don’t think anyone knows the answer. “
Professor Dale Fisher, of the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore, said he sees merit in both strategies.
“Young working adults are generally more active, more social and travel more, so this strategy should decrease transmission in the community faster than vaccinating older individuals,” he told Reuters. “Of course, the elderly are at greater risk of serious illness and death, so vaccinating them has an alternative justification.”
Another factor contributing to Indonesia’s strategy is that the Sinovac vaccine has been tested in clinical trials in people between 18 and 59 years old, and there is still insufficient data on the vaccine’s effectiveness in the elderly, according to Reuters.
Countries like the US and the UK have immunization started with vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which have been shown to work well in people of all ages. As older people are more vulnerable to serious illness and death from COVID-19, they are the first age group to receive vaccines in the US and the UK, after frontline healthcare professionals.
However, in the USA, there was a delay in vaccine administration so far. The Trump administration made an initial pledge to vaccinate 20 million Americans by the end of 2020, but the CDC reports that only about 4.5 million people received their first dose on January 2, out of about 15 million doses sent. .
And although the prioritization layers were established in federal and state guidelines, there were some initial delays implanting the vaccine for long-term care facilities.
Asylum suffered some of the most deadly COVID-19 outbreaks in the country, with more than 127,000 deaths from coronaviruses at these facilities in 2020, according to the COVID Screening Project. In December, asylum was responsible for up to 40% of deaths caused by the virus in the United States.
At CBS “Face The Nation” On Sunday, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former head of the Food and Drug Administration, urged authorities to make vaccines more widely available to people 65 and older to speed up the rate of vaccinations.
“Making the vaccine more generally available at retail pharmacies, at Walmart and Walgreens and CVS for a broader population, for a general population beginning with age,” said Gottlieb.
“We can go through the old continuum, make it available for 75 and above first, then 70 and above and 65 and above,” he continued. “There are 50 million Americans aged 65 and over, a large percentage of them probably want to be vaccinated. At some point, we need to allow supply to meet demand here and put vaccines in the arms of people who really want to be vaccinated and are going to leave and get the vaccine ”.