The head of the country's public health agency, JAKARTA, said on Friday that Indonesia has approved its first locally developed COVID 19 vaccine for emergency use, a step toward the nation's independence in access to medicine. Jakarta stressed the importance of developing national vaccines since the beginning of the epidemic, but it relies on China's Sinovac and Western-made Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA jabs.
The IndoVac jab, developed by state-owned pharmaceutical company Bio Farma and Texas-based Baylor College of Medicine, can now be used as a primary dose for an unvaccinated or partially vaccinated adult in the world's fourth most populous country.
The development of a domestic vaccine is a pride for Indonesians as a foundation and the first step to achieve the nation's independence in access to medicine, head of the national food and drugs agency BPOM Penny Lukito said at a press conference on Friday.
The medical chief said that IndoVac had shown an efficacy rate of 92 per cent, while there were no reports of death linked to it in trials and reported side effects were mild A clinical study to use it as a booster is under way, Lukito said.
The agency has granted emergency use approval for an mRNA vaccine developed in China, becoming the first country to do so.
The BPOM chief said that the inoculated by Walvax Biotechnology will be produced locally in Indonesia.
The homegrown IndoVac Jab has been granted a Halal certificate, which means it can be administered in line with Islamic faith in Muslim-majority Indonesia.
Indonesia was the epicenter of Asia's COVID 19 pandemic in July last year, as the Delta variant swept through the country.
The spread of Omicron brought back confirmed cases to 30,000 a day, but daily cases declined significantly by the end of the year.
It has since seen a fall in case numbers and eliminated quarantine requirements for vaccinated travellers.
Southeast Asia's largest economy has reported more than 6.4 million confirmed cases, with nearly 160,000 deaths.
The Vaccination roll out has been slow compared to developed nations, with less than two-thirds of the population of 270 million receiving two jabs.