Indonesia has announced plans to donate COVID-19 vaccine to working-age adults ahead of the elderly. While the US prioritizes vaccines for health workers i the elderly, Indonesia first has a reason to vaccinate the youngest.
The goal is to achieve herd immunity and revive the economy by vaccinating working people after front-line health workers and civil servants, Reuters reports.
Indonesia uses a vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech. The country will also receive shipments of the Pfizer vaccine and the 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 National University of Australia, told Reuters that Indonesia’s strategy could slow the spread of COVID -19, but may not affect mortality rates.
“Indonesia does it differently in the United States and Europe is valuable, because it will tell us (if) you will see a more dramatic effect in Indonesia than Europe or the United States because of the strategy they are doing,” he said, adding. I don’t think anyone knows the answer. “
Professor Dale Fisher of 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, older people are at higher risk for serious illness and death, so vaccinating them has an alternative basis.”
Another factor contributing to Indonesia’s strategy is that the Sinovac vaccine was tested in clinical trials in people between the ages of 18 and 59, and there are still not enough data on the effectiveness of the vaccine in the elderly. , according to Reuters.
There are countries like the US and the UK vaccinations started with vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which prove to work well in people of all ages. Because older people are more vulnerable to serious illness and death from COVID-19, older people are the first age group to be vaccinated in the U.S. and the UK after front-line health workers.
However, in the US there has been one delay in vaccine administration Bye now. The Trump administration initially pledged to vaccinate 20 million Americans by the end of 2020, but the CDC reports that only 4.5 million people have received their first dose on Jan. 2, of the 15 million doses which have been sent.
And while prioritization levels have been set in state and federal guidelines, there have been some anticipated delays. vaccine deployment a long-term care centers.
Nursing homes have suffered some of the deadliest outbreaks of COVID-19 in the country, with more than 127,000 deaths from coronavirus at these facilities by 2020, according to The COVID Tracking Project. From December, residences for the elderly accounted for up to 40% of deaths in the United States due to the virus.
On CBS “Face The Nation” On Sunday, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former head of the Food and Drug Administration, urged officials to make vaccines more widely available to people 65 and older to speed up the pace of vaccinations.
“Make the vaccine more generally available through retail pharmacies, through Walmart and Walgreens and CVS to a wider population, to a general population that starts with age,” Gottlieb said.
“We can go through the age continuum, make it available for 75 years or more first, after 70 years and over, and 65 years and over,” he continued. “There are 50 million Americans age 65 or older, probably a large percentage of whom want to be vaccinated. At some point, we need to allow supply to meet demand here and get the shots in people’s arms. they really want to get vaccinated and go out and get vaccinated. “