Jakarta to give coronavirus vaccines from China to frontline medical workers

Indonesia will begin giving Chinese-developed coronavirus vaccines to frontline medical staff as soon as next month.

Medical workers conduct COVID-19 tests outside a Jakarta hospital last month. Picture: Getty Images

Indonesia will begin administering coronavirus vaccines to frontline medical workers as soon as next month using Chinese-developed vaccines granted emergency use approval in China for soldiers and doctors, health ministry officials have confirmed.

The rollout, for priority workers aged 18 to 59 with no underlying medical conditions, looks set to go ahead ­despite at least one of the vaccine candidates still undergoing stage-three clinical trials in Indonesia and Brazil.

Achmad Yurianto, the Health Ministry’s disease control and prevention director, confirmed the November start date this week. 

“Indonesia wants to vaccinate our people as soon as possible so we can protect people better, ­reduce the number of ill people, reduce the death rate … through vaccination,” Dr Yurianto said.

A government delegation, ­including senior Islamic clerics, is in China to look at the production of “safe and halal vaccines” that have completed phase-three clinical trials and are being administered. “We hope we can begin injections by the end of ­November, (though) this is of course dependent on Emergency Use Authorisation and a halal recommendation from the ­Religious Ministry and the MUI (Ulema Council of Indonesia),” Dr Yurianto said.

“By the end of this month or first week of November we will ­receive info about this.”

Dr Yurianto named vaccine candidates developed by Chinese companies Sinovac (under stage-three trials in Indonesia), Sinopharm and CanSino as those likely to be administered in the initial phase.

The timing for Indonesia’s first COVID-19 vaccination rollout puts it among the world’s first, raising questions over ethics and safety protocols, given there are as yet no proven vaccines against the coronavirus and Indonesia’s own Sinovac trial will not finish until mid-December.

The plan even appears to have alarmed President Joko Widodo who urged his ministerial colleagues this week to proceed with caution.

“We shouldn’t rush into it. This is very complex. We must be really prepared for vaccines and the public communication for it, especially regarding halal, price, quality, distribution,” he told a cabinet meeting.

“The critical point for vaccines is implementation. What will the process be? Who will be injected first? This must be explained clearly to the public.”

On Monday, the UK’s chief scientific adviser warned Britain was unlikely to see widespread rollout of a vaccine before next northern spring. Even Brazil, which this week revealed preliminary results from its stage-three trials of Sinovac’s CoronoVac on 9000 volunteers showed it was safe, has said it would conduct further trials and did not expect to begin vaccinating before 2021.

Yet China has been administering COVID-19 vaccines since July and began a larger rollout last month under an emergency-use designation, before any of its candidates had received final regulatory approval for general use.

More than a million Chinese citizens (outside of trials) are ­believed to have been vaccinated with one of the four Chinese-­developed candidates as the country strives to become the first to develop an effective vaccine.

The practice is not without precedent. Beijing has cited the World Health Organisation’s own emergency-use principles for the early rollout and insisted the vaccines are safe, even if their efficacy is still to be determined.

But some Indonesian medical workers, now being asked to sign up for early vaccination, have raised doubts about the process.

Dr Lius, a Makassar-based anaesthesiologist, said he had only heard about the early rollout from the media and wanted to know more about the vaccines first.

“I want to see the trial report. I don’t know anything about it now, so it feels scary for me to blindly get injected with a substance I know nothing about,” he said.

Dr Ristyana, a doctor at a Jakarta community health clinic, said she too felt “wary”. “It feels experimental at this point. I want to get vaccinated because I think it will better protect me and my family and allow me to work with less stress but, if there is an option, I would like to wait to hear from the Bandung (stage three) trial so I know what to expect,” she said.

However, Indonesian Medical Association spokesman Halik Malik said he supported the plans “as long as the vaccines have been approved by Food and Drug Monitoring Agency’’.