Bio Farma Could Produce 100mn Dosages of Covid-19 Vaccine for CEPI Each Year

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Bio Farma has the opportunity to make a bigger contribution to the global distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine. The state-owned company has been selected as one of CEPI's Potential Drug Manufacturers for Covid-19.

CEPI, short for Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, is a global government-private and philanthropic coalition formed to tackle infectious disease pandemics by accelerating vaccine development. Their priority is to equalize vaccine distribution, including the Covid-19 vaccine, in poor countries.

"There are Covid-19 vaccine developers that do not have independent mass-production facilities. CEPI will bring them together with vaccine producers that met certain requirements, one of them is Bio Farma," Bio Farma president director Honesti Bashir said in a written statement, Thursday, October 15.

According to Honesti, Bio Farma was selected after passing a due diligence process on September 15, 2020, which includes an assessment of aspects for vaccine production system and quality, laboratory analytical systems, and IT systems in vaccine production.

The CEO said that Bio Farma facility has the potential to be used by CEPI to produce the Covid-19 vaccine with an estimated volume of around 100 million doses per year. The production stage is expected to start in the last quarter of 2021 or the first quarter of 2022.

Honesti said that the election of Bio Farma is inseparable from the company's international experiences. Bio Farma is one of 29 vaccine producers in the world that has been pre-qualified by the World Health Organization (WHO). The company is thus regarded as having met Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), with its vaccine products used in 150 countries. Bio Farma has also successfully developed a new polio vaccine, the Novel Oral Polio Vaccine type 2 (nOPV2).

Read: Task Force Claims No Side Effects Discovered Yet in COVID-19 Vaccine

Ahmad Fikri (Kontributor)