Coronavirus Indonesia: Young to be protected before the elderly

Indonesia is to prioritise young people rather than the elderly for vaccinations in an attempt to achieve herd immunity among the most economically productive sector of its population.

Teachers check the body temperature of a pupil as a precautionary measure against the Covid-19 coronavirus at a kindergarten in Banda Aceh.

Indonesia is to prioritise young people rather than the elderly for vaccinations in an attempt to achieve herd immunity among the most economically productive sector of its population.

Most countries have given the lowest priority to younger healthy people, unless they are medical workers, because they are the least likely to become seriously ill or die from Covid-19.

Indonesia is taking the opposite view on the basis that younger people, being more active and mobile, are most likely to contract and spread the virus to vulnerable age groups. It will begin inoculations next week using a vaccine made by the Chinese company Sinovac.

The first to be injected will be Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s president, to reassure people of the safety of the vaccine. Next will come medical workers, police and military officers, followed by 18 to 59-year-olds in the central island of Java, where most of Indonesia’s 780,000 cases and 23,000 deaths have occurred.

“Our aim is herd immunity,” Amin Soebandrio, director of the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology in Jakarta, told Bloomberg. “With the most active and exposed group of population vaccinated, they form a fortress to protect the other groups. It’s less effective when we use our limited number of vaccines on the elderly.”

Indonesian health staff check Sinovac vaccines for the Covid-19 coronavirus at a storage facility before they are distributed to other provinces, in Banda Aceh.

Another reason for targeting the young, according to the government, is that it has not conducted sufficient trials on those aged 60 and over. It aims to inject 181.5 million people by March 2022, equivalent to 67 per cent of the population of 268 million. Herd immunity is generally assumed to have been achieved when 60 to 70 per cent of a population has been immunised.

“Younger working adults are generally more active, more social and travel more so this strategy should decrease community transmission faster than vaccinating older individuals,” Dale Fisher, professor of infectious diseases at the National University of Singapore, told Reuters. “Of course older people are more at risk of severe disease and death so I see merit in both strategies.”