WHO Gives Emergency Permit for New Polio Vaccine, Bio Farma Participates in Production

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – World Health Organization (WHO) issued an emergency use permit for the nOPV2 polio vaccine on Friday, November 13, 2020. These vaccines, among others, were produced by PT Bio Farma (Persero), a state-owned company in Indonesia.

In a statement, WHO said permits were issued to deal with the high number of polio positive cases in a number of African and East Mediterranean countries. “The western Pacific region and Southeast Asia are also affected by this outbreak,” WHO said in a written broadcast, Friday, as received in Jakarta, Saturday, November 14, 2020.

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For the first time, WHO has issued an Emergency Use Authorization for vaccines. Therefore, WHO hopes that this step can also be applied to the results of developing the Covid-19 vaccine later.

The nOPV2 vaccine is a new type of anti-polio virus (cVDPVs) developed by a global collaborative network of institutions and experts from various countries, the Global Initiative to Eradicate Polio (GPEI).

This collaborative network is followed by Bio Farma; University of Antwerp in Belgium; non-governmental organization Against Infectious Diseases in Developing Countries (FIDEC); The National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC) in the UK; University of California San Francisco (UCSF) in the United States; The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US; and various other non-governmental organizations such as PATH and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In the last 30 years, efforts to eliminate polio cases have reached 99.9 percent. However, it turns out that these efforts have not yet reached the end because the polio virus cVDPVs emerged and spread in populations that rarely have access to immunizations.

“If many children do not get polio immunization, the virus can be passed between individuals and generations so that the virus forms a new strain that can cause paralysis,” the WHO explained.

Added in the same statement, “The type two cVDPVs virus is the type that is quite common today.”

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Bio Farma applies for the January 19 Covid-19 vaccine emergency use

WHO introduced procedures for applying for emergency use permits when Ebola broke out in West Africa in 2014-2016. There are at least three main stages that a vaccine candidate must go through to get this permit.

This stage includes the preparation phase, the emergency phase, and the phase after entering the emergency use permit list. WHO will invite a team of independent experts to examine vaccine candidates and various available phase II and III clinical trial data, as well as set up a surveillance system and design further research.

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