Vaccination against the coronavirus has started in Indonesia. President Joko Widodo received the very first shot in the presidential palace.
“Vaccination is important to break the chain of corona infections, to provide protection and safety to every Indonesian and to speed up the economic recovery,” he said.
Indonesia uses the Chinese vaccine from Sinovac Biotech. The country wants to start vaccinating nearly 1.5 million people who are active in healthcare. After that, it is not the turn of the elderly, as in most countries, but the working population.
Indonesians between the ages of 18 and 59 are therefore given priority over the elderly. That decision rests in part because there is not enough data from studies on the effectiveness of Chinese vaccine in the elderly. President Widodo is just 59 years old in that group.
The country of 275 million inhabitants has relatively few cases of the coronavirus. With just over 858,000 infections, Indonesia is in the world ranking just below the Netherlands. Health authorities blame nearly 25,000 deaths from the coronavirus.