Indonesian officials have been stepping up to the pandemic plate to secure Covid-19 vaccines as they battle to contain the spread of the coronavirus in the world's fourth most populous nation.
Three Chinese pharmaceutical companies and one British firm are among the producers that authorities in Jakarta have been courting to ensure that the country can obtain sufficient supplies once the vaccines are approved for general use.
Seven months since the first case of Covid-19 was confirmed in the country, the number of cases -- 344,749 infections and 12,156 deaths as of Oct 14 -- shows no signs of flattening, with an average of 4,000 new cases a day since mid-September.
The economic fallout from restricted social and business activities has pushed Southeast Asia's largest economy to the brink of a recession, widely expected to be confirmed when the national statistics agency releases official third-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) figures early next month.
In a bid to start inoculating the first 160 million of its 267 million people, Indonesian officials have been crisscrossing the globe to secure commitments from various parties for access to coronavirus vaccines.
The latest attempt took a delegation led by Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi and State-Owned Enterprises Minister Erick Thohir to the United Kingdom and Switzerland last week. It resulted in an agreement for 100 million doses of vaccine from the UK-based pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.
"[Our] meeting with AstraZeneca executives went well. Indonesia has conveyed our request to procure 100 million vaccine doses for 2021. AZ has welcomed our request," Mr Marsudi told journalists in Jakarta on Wednesday evening during an online news conference from London.
"The first shipment is expected to take place in the first half of 2021 and will be done in phases."
During the meeting, Indonesian Health Ministry officials and AZ executives signed a letter of intent for Indonesia to procure the pharmaceutical maker's Covid-19 vaccine candidate. The AZ vaccine, which is based on a non-replicating viral vector platform, is listed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as one of the candidates undergoing final or phase 3 clinical trials.
The delegation also met with UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who confirmed a £1-million commitment by the UK to the Asean Covid-19 Response Fund, Mr Marsudi said.
The deal with AZ follows successful deals with three Chinese producers -- Sinovac Biotech, CanSino Biologics and Sinopharm -- whose candidate vaccines are also undergoing phase 3 trials in various parts of the world. The deals will allow Jakarta to secure supplies for general use or for emergency use authorisation.
Indonesia, Turkey and Brazil are among the countries where Sinovac has been conducting trials of its CoronaVac product. The human trials in Indonesia began in Bandung, West Java in August. If approved for general use, the Sinovac vaccines would be produced domestically by the state-owned vaccine maker PT Bio Farma, also based in Bandung.
"As of Oct 9, 843 volunteers had been injected with the second vaccine shot and 449 volunteers were in the monitoring phase after they had the second injection," Iwan Setiawan, a spokesman for Bio Farma, told Asia Focus last week.
"So far, the phase 3 clinical trial is going well and there are no serious effects reported after the injections with the candidate vaccine."
A delegation led by Luhut Pandjaitan, Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment, visited China recently to finalise vaccine deals with the three companies. It has secured 100,000 single-dose vaccines from CanSino for this year, 15 million dual-dose vaccines from Sinopharm to be manufactured by Abu Dhabi-based G42 Healthcare, and 3 million single-dose vials and 15 million bulk vaccines from Sinovac, most of which are expected to be delivered in November.
Bio Farma's Mr Setiawan said the company was committed to supporting the government in providing the coronavirus vaccine from Sinovac at an affordable price. He was responding to news reports that Sinovac was selling its vaccines to Brazil at a lower price than the price it offered to Indonesia.
In addition to this year's procurement, Indonesia expects to secure 20 million single-dose vaccines from CanSino and 50 million dual-dose vaccines from Sinopharm and G42 in 2021.
Health Minister Terawan Agus Putranto, who was part of the delegation, said the ministry has been training health workers and other personnel at facilities across the country on vaccination procedures and would soon launch a simulation.
"We are giving priority to those at the front line against the pandemic, such as health workers, public servants, military and police personnel, as well as those in the education sector," Mr Putranto said.
The government, meanwhile, continues to express optimism that its handling of the pandemic will place Indonesia among the countries seeing one of the smallest economic contractions this year. The upbeat mood runs counter to criticism that the official response has been disorganised and the number of people tested remains among of the lowest in the world.
"We are among the top five countries in the world that have managed to balance the Covid-19 response and economic contraction," chief economic minister Airlangga Hartarto said during a media briefing on Oct 12.
He expressed hope that the economic outlook would "bounce back" by year-end, predicting the contraction in GDP could be quite modest, somewhere between 1% and 0.6%.
A survey conducted by the LaporCovid-19 (Report Covid-19) community, however, showed that the public is divided in their acceptance of the various vaccines being developed.
Dicky Pelupessy, one of the community's collaborators and a psychologist at the University of Indonesia, said in an online news conference on Oct 13 that only 31% of almost 3,000 respondents in 34 provinces would take the Sinovac-Bio Farma vaccine, and 69% remained doubtful and would not take it.
Respondents had a better view of the home-researched Red and White candidate vaccine that a national consortium of research agencies is developing, with 44% saying they would take it and 56% saying they had doubts about it.
Pandu Riono, an epidemiologist from the University of Indonesia, cautioned that a vaccine is not a solution to the pandemic, and as long as there are countries that do not get their share of doses, the pandemic will remain a global problem.
"We are still in pandemic-controlling mode to lower the number of infections so that we can live in coexistence with the disease. Even if we have the vaccine, we still don't know if it will be safe and advantageous," Mr Riono said, responding to the survey results.
But initial rejection of a vaccine is common and over time, the public would grow to accept it, especially if they have gone through the sickness, said Prof Kusnandi Rusmil, a vaccine researcher from Padjajaran University in Bandung and head of the Sinovac-Bio Farma clinical trial team.
"I am not worried about the anti-vaccine view, it is only a small fraction of the public," he said. "We are dealing with a new disease caused by a novel virus that has infected a lot of people and caused a lot of deaths. Eventually, they would see that they need the vaccine whether they like it or not.
"A vaccine, in my view, is critical to eliminating a disease, in addition to the other efforts."