The Medan city government, North Sumatra, is seeking to prioritize vaccinations of 8,078 pregnant women in the city, Mayor Bobby Nasution said on Thursday.
"The Medan city government is going to push the vaccination program for pregnant women sometime soon," Nasution said in Medan.
The city government would try its best to do as the central government has suggested, after stipulating that COVID-19 vaccines are safe for pregnant women and their fetuses, he added.
The mayor said he expected the mass vaccination to accelerate the formation of herd immunity, so the enforcement of level 4 community activity restrictions in Medan could be lifted.
"From the data, there are at least 27,140 pregnant women in Medan. Some 10,124 may be vaccinated as they fulfill the criteria of 14 to 33 weeks of gestation," Nasution informed.
"Yet there are only 8,078 pregnant women who are available and willing to be vaccinated in Medan," he noted.
The North Sumatra provincial government has arranged and hastened many vaccination programs for pregnant women to protect them from COVID-19 infection, because many women have died of the disease, he added.
"Vaccination is one of the efforts so that pregnant women can avoid the transmission of COVID-19. But they still have to follow the 5M health protocols," acting head of the North Sumatra Health Office, Dr. Aris Yudhariansyah, said.
The Medan city government's vaccination effort is in line with the agenda laid out by the central government, he added.
President Joko Widodo is pushing for the vaccination of 70 percent of the Indonesian population by the end of 2021.
Meanwhile an expert from Center for Indonesian Policy Study (CIPS), Andree Surianta, has forecast that the state can vaccinate 2.7 million people per day should more vaccine stocks from overseas arrive in Indonesia.
Editor : Riza Mulyadi
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