Indonesia has announced plans to release the COVID-19 vaccine to adults of working age before the elderly. While the US gives priority to vaccines for health care workers and the elderlyIndonesia has a reason to vaccinate younger people first.
The goal is to achieve immunity to herds and revitalize the economy by vaccinating working people in addition to primary care health workers and officials, Reuters reports.
Indonesia uses a vaccine developed by Sinovac Biotech of China. According to Reuters, the country will also receive shipments of the Pfizer vaccine and vaccine from AstraZeneca and Oxford University later this year.
As for choosing to vaccinate younger adults rather than older people, Peter Collignon, a professor of infectious diseases at the Australian National University, told Reuters Indonesia’s strategy could slow the spread of COVID-19, but may not affect death rates. .
“Indonesia is doing it differently from the US and Europe is of value because it will tell us (if) you will see a more dramatic effect in Indonesia than in Europe or the US because of the strategy they are doing,” he said. , “I don’t think anyone knows the answer.”
Professor Dale Fisher of the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore said he sees value in both strategies.
“Younger working adults are generally more active, more social and travel more, so this strategy should reduce community transmission faster than vaccinating older individuals,” he told Reuters. “Older people are of course more at risk of serious illness and death, so vaccinating those people 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 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 started immunizations with vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which have been shown to work well in people of all ages. Since the elderly are most vulnerable to serious illness and death from COVID-19, seniors are the first age group to receive vaccinations in the US and UK after primary care health workers.
In the US, however, there is one delay in the administration of vaccines until now. The Trump administration has made an initial pledge to vaccinate 20 million Americans by the end of 2020, but the CDC reports that only about 4.5 million people received their first dose on Jan. 2, of the roughly 15 million doses sent.
And while priority levels are set in federal and state guidelines, there were some early delays using the vaccine to long-term care facilities.
Nursing homes have suffered some of the deadliest COVID-19 outbreaks in the country, with more than 127,000 deaths from coronavirus in such facilities in 2020, according to The COVID Tracking Project. From December nursing homes accounts for a whopping 40% of deaths in the US from the virus.
On CBS’s “Face The Nation” On Sunday, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former chief of the Food and Drug Administration, urged officials to make the vaccines more widely available to people 65 and older to speed up the pace of vaccinations.
“Make the vaccine more widely available through pharmacies, through Walmart and Walgreens, and CFS for a wider population, for a general population that starts with age,” said Gottlieb.
“We can go down the age continuum, making it available first to 75 and over, then 70 and over and 65 and over,” he continued. “There are 50 million Americans age 65 and older, a large percentage of them probably want to be vaccinated. At some point, we have to make the supply here meet the demand and get the shots in the arms of the people who really want vaccinated. and go out to find the vaccination. “