Indonesia has announced plans to launch the COVID-19 vaccine to adults of working age for the elderly. While the US prefers vaccines for health workers and the elderly, Indonesia has a reason to vaccinate younger people first.
The goal is to achieve herd immunity and revive the economy by vaccinating working people to health workers and government officials in the foreground, Reuters reports.
Indonesia uses a vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech. According to Reuters, the country will later also receive the Pfizer vaccine and the vaccine from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford.
Regarding the choice to vaccinate younger adults in front of the elderly, Peter Collignon, professor of infectious diseases at the Australian National University, told Reuters that Indonesia’s strategy could slow down the spread of COVID-19, but that it did not affect mortality. not.
“Indonesia is doing it differently than the US and Europe is of value because it will tell us (or) you will see a more dramatic effect in Indonesia than Europe or the US because of the strategy they are doing,” he said. . “I don’t think anyone knows what the answer is.”
Professor Dale Fisher of the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore said he sees the merits in both strategies.
“Younger working adults are generally more active, more social and travel more, so this strategy will reduce the spread of communities faster than vaccinating older people,” he told Reuters. “Obviously, older people are at greater risk of suffering from serious illnesses and deaths, so vaccinating them has an alternative reason.”
Another contributing factor to Indonesia’s strategy is that the Sinovac vaccine has been tested in clinical trials on people between the ages of 18 and 59, and according to Reuters, there is still insufficient data on the efficacy of the vaccine in the elderly.
Countries like the US and the UK have start vaccinations with vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, and it has been shown to work well in people of all ages. As the elderly are most vulnerable to serious illnesses and deaths due to COVID-19, the elderly are the first age group to be vaccinated in the US and UK to health care workers.
In the US, however, there was a delays in the administration of vaccines so far. The Trump administration made an initial promise to vaccinate 20 million Americans by 2020, but the CDC reports that only 4.5 million people received their first dose as of Jan. 2, out of an estimated 15 million doses sent.
And although priority levels were set out in federal and state guidelines, there were early delays the vaccination of the vaccine on long-term care facilities.
Nursing Homes suffered from the deadliest COVID-19 outbreaks in the country in 2020, with more than 127,000 coronavirus deaths, according to the COVID Tracking Project. From December nursing homes responsible for as much as 40% of U.S. deaths due to the virus.
On CBS “Face The Nation” On Sunday, dr. Scott Gottlieb, former head of the Food and Drug Administration, is urging officials to make the vaccines more widely available to people aged 65 and older to speed up the rate of vaccinations.
“Make the vaccine more widely available through retail pharmacies, through Walmart and Walgreens and CVS for a wider population, for a general population starting at age,” Gottlieb said.
“We can take it through the age continuum, first making it available to 75 and older, then 70 and higher, and 65 and older,” he continued. “There are 50 million Americans aged 65 and over, a large percentage of them probably want to be vaccinated. At some point we need to allow the supply here to meet the demand and get the shots in the arms of the people who really wants to get vaccinated and goes looking for the vaccine. ‘