Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – The Ministry of Health (Kemenkes) is working on accelerating Covid-19 vaccination in Indonesia. The reason is, the Sinovac vaccine will expire on March 25, 2021.
In the Sinovac package, it is noted that the Covid-19 vaccine will expire until 2023, but it is accelerated to March 25, 2021 or is only valid for six months.
PT Bio Farma (Persero) previously stated that all of the first batch vaccines, whose expiration date will expire on March 25, 2021, have been distributed in early January 2021. Furthermore, the vaccine will immediately be used for the Covid-19 vaccination process.
Vaccination spokesperson from the Ministry of Health, Siti Nadia Tarmizi, said the acceleration was reasonable for vaccines issued through the emergency use permit (EUA). The government continues to push for the acceleration of the first batch of vaccinations.
“We know that the permit for emergency use is a maximum of 6 months, so indeed we have to speed up the injection process. Currently we know that there are nearly 300 thousand doses per day of injection,” said Nadia, as quoted by the press. CNN Indonesia, Friday (12/3/2021).
However, there are still some obstacles to the acceleration of vaccination. One of them is the distribution of vaccines to a number of areas with limited road access or underdeveloped, frontier and outermost areas in Indonesia.
“So with the potential for expiration, we will always encourage, this is our challenge, especially in remote, outermost, and deepest areas to immediately vaccinate them considering that this vaccination has a fairly short period of use,” explained Nadia.
Previously, the Head of the Covid-19 Vaccine Clinical Trial Research Team, Sinovac Kusnandi Rusmil, explained that even though the expiration period has expired, there is an extension period for the use of the vaccine. This is according to the rules of the Food and Drug Supervisory Agency (BPOM).
However, he emphasized that the impact of using expired vaccines could reduce vaccine sensitivity so that the antibodies generated from the vaccine would be low. Especially for expired Sinovac, it will not form antibodies.
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