The whole world needs to pay attention to Indonesia’s COVID vaccine strategy – BGR

The whole world needs to pay attention to Indonesia’s COVID vaccine strategy – BGR

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  • More than 42.2 million doses of coronavirus vaccine have been administered worldwide at the time of this writing, by Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker.
  • Most countries have started their vaccine programs with vaccines for the elderly, but at least one large country is taking a different approach.
  • Indonesia will give people of working age a vaccination against coronavirus before moving on to the older population.

Here’s an interesting thinking experiment. If you were responsible for the coronavirus vaccine strategy in the United States, what would be your priorities? Would you decide that the vaccine needs to be administered as quickly as possible to the most vulnerable – for example, to the elderly, who we now know are at greater risk of dying from COVID-19? Or would you rush to vaccinate people who are infecting those elderly people? In other words, would it be better to start your COVID vaccine strategy by inoculating people who get sick more often and spread the virus to others?

You can follow the logic behind that second choice, right? Even if it seems risky, despise older people who are most likely to die during the coronavirus pandemic. Distributing the vaccine as soon as possible to younger people, however, is significantly easier – these younger people can go to the vaccine site, for example, instead of health professionals having to go to older people, to nursing homes and to like it. In addition, it is often young people who contract COVID and then hug or, somehow, pass the virus on to their grandmother and grandfather. This option eliminates that (presumably, but more about that at a time). Furthermore, this option also helps the working age population to return to work more quickly and the economy a little to normal earlier. And although the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe have decided to follow a similar path – starting their respective vaccination efforts targeting vulnerable populations such as the elderly – Indonesia is about to embark on a closely observed experiment, starting its vaccination effort itself starting with health workers, public officials (to increase public confidence) and then the general population aged 18 to 59 years old. That is, vaccinate young people before the elderly.

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Now, to be clear – Indonesia is not doing this to purposely rebel against the vaccination strategy standard of most Western countries. You are doing this because have to. “We are not going against the trend,” said Siti Nadia Tarmizi, senior official at the Indonesian health ministry. Reuters, adding that the country’s drug regulators still need more data before deciding how to proceed with vaccinating the elderly.

That’s because the country only has access to China’s Sinovac Biotech coronavirus vaccine at the moment. Unlike the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on which the United States and the United Kingdom depend, with its strong effectiveness found in people of all ages, Indonesia defended its decision by saying that it still does not have enough data on the effect of the Sinovac vaccine on elderly people .

The vaccine launch in Indonesia here will be closely monitored for two reasons. One is what we’ve already discussed – what kind of difference this will make to infection rates, starting with the people who are most infected, rather than the people who are infected worse? However, the other thing is that we also do not know to what extent vaccinated people can still transmit the coronavirus after vaccination.

In other words, think about getting vaccinated like wearing gloves. You are now wearing a layer of protection over your hands, but these gloves can still get dirty and can mess up the things you touch – impacting other people, if you’re not careful

“I don’t think anyone can be too dogmatic about what the right approach is,” said Peter Collignon, professor of infectious diseases at Australian National University, in an interview about the vaccination strategy in Indonesia.

Andy is a reporter in Memphis who also contributes to vehicles like Fast Company and The Guardian. When not writing about technology, he can be found perched protectively on his burgeoning vinyl collection, as well as nurturing his Whovianism and devouring a variety of TV shows that you probably don’t like.

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