Indonesia has joined a list of countries that had to face a sudden surge of COVID-19 cases due to Chinese vaccines. Chinese vaccines have already shown failure across five countries- the UAE, Bahrain, Chile, Peru, and Seychelles. Countries like Seychelles and the UAE inoculated large swathes of their population, yet there are no signs of herd immunity kicking in. Now a similar problem has arrived in Indonesia, and it has turned into an unprecedented health crisis given it has hit the doctors disproportionately.
Despite being vaccinated with the Chinese Sinovac vaccine, more than 350 Indonesian doctors have infected COVID-19, with many being hospitalised, officials said, raising questions about the efficiency of some vaccines against more severe virus strains. China-made vaccines are a prevalent element hurting vaccination programmes in many countries. According to Badai Ismoyo, head of the Kudus district health office in Central Java, the majority of the doctors were asymptomatic and self-isolating at home, but dozens were hospitalised with high fevers and low oxygen saturation levels.
Indonesian health care workers, who were designated as a priority category, were among the first to be vaccinated when the vaccination campaign began in January. Almost everyone has got the COVID-19 vaccine, which was created by Sinovac, a Chinese biopharmaceutical company, according to the Indonesian Medical Association (IDI). “The data shows they have the Delta variant [in Kudus] so it is no surprise that the breakthrough infection is higher than before because as we know the majority of health care workers in Indonesia got Sinovac, and we still don’t know yet how effective it is in the real world against the Delta variant,” said Dicky Budiman, an epidemiologist from Australia’s Griffith University.
Earlier, the situation got a lot worse in Seychelles, a strategically located island of fewer than 100,000 people in East Africa. Seychelles is the most vaccinated against COVID-19 in the world. It has vaccinated even more people than Israel, which has gone mask-free following sufficient inoculation in the country.
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Over 60 per cent of Seychellois got vaccinated a few weeks ago itself. But the island country made a big mistake- it relied heavily on Sinopharm to vaccinate most of its citizens. However, COVID-19 cases picked up in the island country once it started relaxing Pandemic-related restrictions. The island country is now grappling with over 1,900 COVID-19 cases and restrictions had to be reimposed to curb the fresh surge in infection.
And while these developments are destroying Indonesia’s health infrastructure, Nikkei Asia said that a spokesperson from Sinovac and Indonesia’s ministry of health were not immediately available to comment on the efficacy of Sinovac’s CoronaVac against newer coronavirus variants.
In the Indonesian capital Jakarta, radiologist Dr Prijo Sidipratomo told Reuters he knew of at least half a dozen doctors in the city who had been hospitalized with COVID-19 in the past month despite being vaccinated, with one currently being treated in ICU. “It is alarming for us because we cannot rely on vaccinations only,” he said, urging people to strictly adhere to health protocols.
