Regarding The Vaccine Embargo, Minister Of Health Budi Maintain Stock Availability

Minister of Health Budi Gunadi Sadikin when vaccinated (Photo: screenshot)

JAKARTA - The Indonesian Ministry of Health is maintaining the availability of the COVID-19 vaccine as an effort to inject vaccinations in April 2021. This is because the plan for AstraZeneca vaccine delivery for the March and April 2021 periods to Indonesia has been postponed due to an embargo by manufacturers in India.

This was following the increase in COVID-19 cases which caused the country to embargo shipments of AstraZeneca vaccines to WHO and GAVI. India is known as the largest manufacturer of the COVID-19 vaccine in the world, apart from China by producing the Novavax vaccine, AstraZeneca, including Pfizer.

"Indonesia only had 7 million doses of the vaccine from Sinovac in April. I thought I could get 7.5 million doses from AstraZeneca", said Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin in the monitored YouTube online broadcast of Charta Politika Indonesia, Monday, March 29.

According to the initial plan, Indonesia received 2.5 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine on March 22 and an additional 7.5 million more doses of vaccine in April 2021. Budi estimates that Indonesia could have a total of 15 million vaccines.

However, Budi said, the schedule was actually postponed because there was an embargo that prevented the vaccine from leaving their country. As a result, the availability of the COVID-19 vaccine in Indonesia will decrease in number in April 2021.

As of Friday, March 26, Budi said the rate of injection of vaccine doses had reached 10 million people with an average vaccination rate of 500 thousand people, even close to 600 thousand people per day. "If we only have 7 million doses of vaccine, that means only 14 days", he said.

The rate of injection of the COVID-19 vaccine in Indonesia, said Budi, has followed the participation rate in a number of countries that do not produce vaccines, namely Israel and France. "I was thinking the number of vaccines that we have we are slowly holding back", he said.

However, Budi confirmed that Indonesia has four sources of supply of vaccines from different producers in the world. Among them, Sinovac from China, Pfizer from Germany-America, Novavax from America, and AstraZeneca from London.

"So if one is hit, we still have three producers. I can't imagine that all countries in the world rely on AstraZeneca, they really have problems", he said.