Indonesia accelerates vaccination campaign by shortening time period for booster shots

JAKARTA, Feb 27 (Bloomberg): Indonesia is accelerating its vaccination campaign to curb the spread of the omicron variant by shortening the gap between the second dose and a booster dose to three months from six, according to a new rule issued by the Ministry of Health.

Slightly more than half of its 270 million population have been fully vaccinated, according to Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker, with merely 3.6% of them receiving their booster shots.

New infections have consistently been higher than the peaks suffered during the delta outbreak last year, even when symptoms were generally milder and hospitalisations were low.

On Saturday (Feb 27), it added 46,643 cases and 258 new fatalities. It's total tally of infections has risen to 5,504,418, the Health Ministry said.

According to the ministry, the death toll from Covid-19 in the country rose by 258 to 147,844, while 41,805 more people recovered from the disease during the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of recoveries to 4,778,039.

As the Indonesian government is accelerating its national vaccination programmes to curb the spread of the virus, more than 190.67 million people have received their first doses of vaccines, while over 143.77 million have taken the second doses.

Indonesia started mass Covid-19 vaccinations in January last year after the authorities approved the emergency use of the Chinese Sinovac vaccine.

Aiming to fully vaccinate 208.2 million people in the country, the government has administered over 344.25 million doses, including the third booster jabs.