Indonesia The Arrival Of 5 Million Pfizer Vaccines, How Are The Domestic Vaccines?

Photo by Mufid Majnun on Unsplash

JAKARTA - The government has again brought in five million doses of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine to meet vaccine needs in areas that run out of stock.

"So, two days ago, five million doses of Pfizer vaccine had arrived. It has arrived. Now we are ready to distribute it," said Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin as reported by Antara.

The government received a grant of five million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine made by Pfizer through the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) scheme.

The supply of the COVID-19 vaccine, he said, was then distributed to areas where vaccine supplies were running low.

The Minister of Health said that the problem of stocking COVID-19 vaccines, among others, occurred because the government had detained imports of vaccines because it wanted to prioritize the use of domestically produced vaccines.

"We have a vaccine produced by domestic vaccines, so we hold the imported ones first, so that domestic production enters. But it turns out that domestic production has been delayed a bit, but actually the decline is because clinical trials for boosters have not left BPOM," he said, Wednesday, October 26.

He hopes that domestically produced vaccines can immediately obtain a permit for use from the Food and Drug Supervisory Agency (BPOM) and can be distributed to the regions in November 2022.

"Actually, domestic production from end to end is IndoVac and Inavac from Biotis. But this is also still waiting for permission from BPOM, we hope that what was previously October, hopefully, November will come out," concluded the Minister of Health.