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Stop Accidental Herd Immunity

  'God's SELECTION. God is choosing. Who continues to live and who is considered enough'. This is the last post of Bambang Purwoko, a lecturer at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences and the Head of the UGM Papua Task Force on his Facebook page, Sunday (4/7/2021), who was all at that time. Ten days later, Mr. Bambang died. Hopefully he had died with blessing (husnul khatimah). Previously, the deceased had posted his worries. 'Anomaly? The epidemic is getting worse, but the streets and public places are getting livelier.” That is the reflection of Mr. Purwoko before he died, which is very appropriate in describing the conditions in mid-2021. The posts aptly reflected this mid-2021 crisis. The second wave of Covid-19 that has plagued our country had to be controlled. President Jokowi had imposed an emergency community activity restriction (PPKM) on July 3-20 2021 and extended it until July 25, 2021, and had been extended again until August 2, 2021. When the emergency PPKM began, the daily additional rate was 27,913 people. The President's target was that the cases would fall below 10 thousand people per day.

Organizing the Reason of Pandemic Management

Our nation is one of those who easily become sensitive, especially to things related to the Covid-19 pandemic. They were frustrated because they were forbidden to travel inland (mudik), but they broke through the ban on inland traveling. The result was a tremendous explosion of Covid-19 cases. The government also pulled the 'hand brake' with the implementation of emergency community activity restrictions (PPKM) at that time. The explosion was compounded by the 'foreign factor', the delta variant from India. The Central Indonesian Medical Association (Ikatan Dokter Indonesia/IDI), through its Deputy General Chair Slamet Budiarto, said this variant was the main trigger for the current bad situation. This variant was brought by foreigners or Indonesians who returned home because the country's gates were not closed while the people were prohibited from traveling inland between regions. The combination of the factors of inland-traveling break-ins and foreign variants had proven to be deadly.

Undoing the Trap of Imported Pharmaceutical Raw Materials

If phytopharmaceuticals are developed more seriously, including market certainty, good prospects lie ahead for Indonesia to be able to reduce dependence on imported BBO or finished pharmaceutical products. President Joko Widodo is irked by Indonesia’s huge dependence on imports for drugs, pharmaceutical raw materials, and medical equipment. He wants to not just reduce the imports, but stop them altogether. "Speaking about health equipment, drugs and raw materials for medicines, we have to stop importing these items. We must produce them ourselves in our [own] country," the President said on 27 Dec. 2021 at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Bali International Hospital in Denpasar. Of course, we must support this good intention, but apart from medical equipment, do we have the capacity to stop importing raw materials for manufacturing drugs? Can we rely on our upstream pharmaceutical industry?

Controlling Corona Vaccination Effect in Chronic Kidney Disease Patients

To build herd immunity against corona or Covid-19, vulnerable groups, both because of age and health conditions, are prioritized in vaccination. People with congenital diseases are given special conditions. In essence, most of them can be vaccinated under certain conditions, including vaccination of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). There is a lot of news, especially on social media, about events related to vaccination. Most of the news is difficult to analyze because the information is incomplete and tends to be bombastic. So, as an effort to anticipate PIFE (post-immunization follow-up events), the side effects of Covid-19 vaccination need to be known, especially regarding CKD. This study needs to be carried out while waiting for comprehensive research on PIFE from various types of Covid-19 vaccines in CKD patients.

Accelerating National Research in 2022

We have just left 2021 and entered 2022. We all hope that the Covid-19 pandemic can be more under control, the economy grows evenly, and we can achieve progress in all fields. We also hope that academics and scientists will continue to conduct research in all fields to catch up with the progress that we have not yet achieved. Research is the foundation of a nation's progress, and one of the benchmarks for research progress is the achievement of the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize is a great honor for scientists, writers and humanitarian fighters. So far, the Nobel prizes for the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Medicine and Economics have always been dominated by scientists from European countries and the United States (US). Only recently have scientists from developed Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea or Israel won the Nobel Prize as well.