Minister Of Health Budi Targets 181.5 Million People To Have Been Vaccinated By The End Of The Year

Minister of Health Budi Gunadi Sadikin shows AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine. (Moch Asim/Antara)

JAKARTA - Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin targets 181 million Indonesians to have received the COVID-19 vaccination by the end of 2021.

This is done by accelerating the vaccination program so that national communal immunity (herd immunity) is achieved.

"We will accelerate the vaccination program in Indonesia so that by the end of the year, 181.5 million Indonesians can be vaccinated, at least (at least) once (dose)", Budi said in a Youtube video broadcast by the Presidential Secretariat's channel, Wednesday, June 30.

Budi is optimistic that this target will be achieved. This is because Indonesia has received 14 million vaccines today. This illustrates that the number of vaccines entering Indonesia will increase over time.

The 14 million vaccines that arrived today are the Sinovac brand from China. These vaccines arrive in bulk or raw materials. These tens of millions of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine represent the eighteenth delivery of the vaccine.

"The total vaccine raw materials from Sinovac that have come to us are 105 million doses of vaccine", said Budi.

Budi emphasized that the 14 million doses of vaccines that came today were still in the form of raw materials. That is, there needs to be a production process into ready-to-use materials by PT Bio Farma.

"It takes about a month to process at Bio Farma to become a ready-to-use vaccine. From this 105 million, there will be 85 million ready-made vaccines that we can use and it will be ready one month after now", said Budi.

Thus, in early August, Indonesia will have 85 million doses of the Sinovac vaccine ready for use. Besides Sinovac, there will be millions of vaccines under other brands.

"This is another free vaccine donation from Covax GAVI. We will also enter this month from AstraZeneca, in August it will come from Pfizer, so the number of vaccines entering the second half of this year will increase", said Budi.

As of yesterday, there were 28.304.774 people who had received the first dose of COVID-19 vaccination and 13.329.738 of the second dose of vaccination.