Indonesia has announced plans to give COVID-19 vaccine in working-age adults before the elderly. While the US gives priority to vaccines for health workers and the elderly, Indonesia first has a reason to vaccinate younger people.
The goal is to boost the herd’s immunity and revive the economy by vaccinating people after health workers and civil servants, Reuters reports.
Indonesia uses a vaccine developed by Sinovac Biotech in China. The country will also receive deliveries of Pfizer vaccine and vaccine by AstraZeneca and Oxford University later this year, according to Reuters.
Regarding the choice to vaccinate younger adults before the elderly, Peter Collignon, a professor of infectious diseases at the Australian National University, told Reuters that Indonesia’s strategy could slow the spread of COVID-19, but may not affect rates of infection. mortality.
“Indonesia is doing this differently from the US and Europe is valuable because it will tell us (if) you will see a more dramatic effect in Indonesia than Europe or the US because of the strategy they are doing,” he said, adding, “I don’t think so. that someone knows the answer. “
Professor Dale Fisher of the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore said he sees merit in both strategies.
“Younger working adults are generally more active, more social and travel more, so this strategy should decrease community transmission faster than vaccinating older people,” he told Reuters. Of course, the elderly are more at risk of serious illness and death, so vaccinating them has an alternative reason.
Another factor contributing to Indonesia’s strategy is that the Sinovac vaccine has been tested in clinical trials in people between the ages of 18 and 59 and there is not yet enough data on the vaccine’s effectiveness in the elderly, according to Reuters.
Countries like the US and the UK have immunizations started with vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which have been shown to work well in people of all ages. Since the elderly are the most vulnerable to serious illness and death from COVID-19, the elderly are the first age group to receive vaccinations in the US and the UK after health care workers.
However, in the US there was a lag in the administration of vaccines so far. The Trump administration has made an initial commitment to vaccinate 20 million Americans by the end of 2020, but the CDC reports that only about 4.5 million people have received their first dose since Jan. 2, out of about 15 million doses. which have been shipped.
And while priority-setting levels have been set in federal and state guidelines, there have been some early delays. development of the vaccine to long-term care facilities.
Nursing homes suffered some of the deadliest outbreaks of COVID-19 in the country, with more than 127,000 coronavirus deaths in such facilities by 2020, according to The COVID Tracking Project. Since December, nursing homes they accounted for up to 40% of US deaths from the virus.
On CBS “Make the Nation” On Sunday, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former head of the Food and Drug Administration, urged officials to make vaccines more accessible to people aged 65 and over to speed up the pace of vaccinations.
“Make the vaccine more generally available through retail pharmacies, through Walmart and Walgreens and CVS for a wider population, for a general population starting with age,” Gottlieb said.
“We can go through it in the age continuum, we can make it available first for 75 years, then for 70 years and over, and for 65 and over,” he continued. “There are 50 million Americans over the age of 65, a large percentage of whom probably want to be vaccinated. At some point, we need to allow supply to meet the demand here and get the shots in the arms of people who really want be vaccinated and go out and seek vaccination. “