Good News! First Novavax Vaccine Enters Indonesia, Efficacy Against COVID Reaches 96.4 Percent

JAKARTA - Indonesia has again arrived at the 135th stage of the COVID-19 vaccine on Saturday, November 27 evening. A total of 134,500 vaccines that arrived at Soekarno Hatta Airport were of the Novavax type.

In the Novavax vaccine, this is the first time it has arrived. Novavax is manufactured by an American company. The plan is that there will be 10 million Novavax vaccines that will arrive in Indonesia.

Acting Director General of Prevention, Eradication of Infectious Diseases and Health (P2P) of the Ministry of Health Maxi Rein Rondonuwu explained, Novavax is a protein-based vaccine engineered from the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2.

"This Novavax vaccine is a COVID-19 vaccine with a sub-unit protein platform. In this vaccine, a protein engineered from the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 is added with a saponin-based m matrix," said Maxi in the Presidential Secretariat's Youtube show, Sunday, 28 November.

Maxi revealed that the level of efficacy or efficacy of the Novavax vaccine in warding off the corona virus was 89.7 percent against COVID-19 variant B117 or Alpha and 96.4 percent against non-B117 variant viruses.

"So, the Novavax vaccine is given a dose of 5 micrograms 2 times with a time of 21 days. So it's almost the same as the Sinovac and Pfizer vaccines, for the distance," said Maxi.

Furthermore, Maxi said the arrival of the Novavax vaccine was to strengthen the achievement of the vaccination immunization program in achieving herd immunity.

Maxi said the government is targeting to be able to secure a total of around 412 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine to cover vaccination needs in Indonesia with various strategies.

"We know that together with several strategies, there are bilateral multilateral strategies as well as exploration of domestic vaccine production capabilities, which hopefully next year we can use domestic vaccine production," explained Maxi.

As of November 27, there were 138,119,613 people who had received the first dose of COVID-19 vaccination and 93,666,839 people received the second dose of vaccination. While the third dose of vaccination was 1,224,061. Meanwhile, the target for vaccination in Indonesia is 208,265,720 people.