VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

The Indonesian government is targeting to increase the rate of COVID-19 vaccinations to 2.5 million per day in September this year, an official has said.

"Our target is to pursue 2-2.5 million vaccinations per day with targets in Java-Bali regions of 1.5 million each day -- optimizing the vaccination programs in seven agglomeration areas -- and one million per day for regions outside Java-Bali," Health Ministry’s spokesperson for the COVID-19 Vaccination Program, Siti Nadia Tarmizi, said at a webinar entitled ‘COVID-19 Vaccination Now and Later’, accessed from here on Wednesday.

The challenge for the current COVID-19 vaccination program is the large demand, while the availability of the vaccines depends on their delivery from abroad and the process of producing the vaccine from semi-finished into finished form, she pointed out.

Hence, the rate of vaccinations can be increased by increasing the number of vaccines distributed, Tarmizi said.

So far, Indonesia has received 225 million vaccine doses, she noted.

According to the ministry’s Electronic Logistics and Immunization Monitoring System (SMILE), 106 million doses have been used out of the 155 million doses disbursed as of Tuesday. Thus, vaccine utilization has reached 69 percent per day, Tarmizi said.

Furthermore, COVID-19 vaccines manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer have also been given to the general public and pregnant women for the first and second doses, and as boosters to health workers, she added.

In addition, Pfizer vaccines will be distributed to other provinces since the vaccination coverage in Jakarta has been quite extensive, the spokesperson said.

However, distributing the vaccines to all 34 provinces across Indonesia will be quite a challenge as the vaccines need to be stored at a temperature of -70 degrees Celsius, she pointed out.

Thus, they cannot be given to remote areas of Indonesia, she said.

"Hence, the vaccines are only disbursed to the vaccination sites around the vaccine warehouse in frozen form and must be diluted, thus they require a special refrigerator. They only last 30 days – it is the challenge of using Pfizer's vaccine," Tarmizi added.

Furthermore, she informed that cases of the Delta variant have continued to dominate the confirmed case tally in the last 60 days.

"It becomes our vigilance. West Sulawesi has become the only region that has not reported any finding of Delta variant," she added. (Antaranews)