Until today, the government of Indonesia has received another batch of 8 million of bulk vaccines from Sinovac Biotech Ltd in China.
Despite the sufficient supplies, State-Owned Enterprises (SOE) Minister Erick Thohir, who is also the executive director of the government’s COVID-19 Response and Economic Recovery Committee, expected people to maintain strict discipline so they can suppress the virus transmission and restart the country’s economy.
“We are grateful that despite the global disruption to vaccine supply, we’ve managed to keep ours safe. And there is more coming our way,” Erick told a press conference held at the cargo terminal at the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on Monday.
Erick added that the combination of the large number of people who have received the COVID-19 vaccine while at the same time maintaining health protocol discipline would not only be great news for public health but also a boost to the country’s economy.
As information, the new bulk vaccines were shipped in three large specially designed containers, called envirotainers, and one smaller one.
They are now stored at the state-owned pharmaceutical company PT Bio Farma in Bandung, West Java, to be further processed into ready-to-use vaccines.
Previously, Indonesia had received 3 million ready-to-use vaccine doses and 81.5 million doses of bulk vaccine from Sinovac. The first batch of Sinovac’s bulk vaccine was then processed into 65.5 million ready-to-use vaccine doses.
The gap between the size of the bulk vaccine in the initial batch and the final product is due to wastage and overfill during the production process.
The government has also received another 6.41 million doses from Astra Zeneca, 1 million from Sinopharm, of which 500,000 doses were in the form of a grant from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
