After breaking several records for daily COVID-19 cases and fatalities in recent weeks, Indonesia received 1.2 million doses of the candidate vaccine from Chinese biopharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech in the late hours of Sunday.

The COVID-19 handling and national economic recovery committee soon shared the news on its social media channels by uploading a picture of a kid jumping with the caption: "Vaccines have arrived, I am happy.”

But the sentiment was not shared by the entire public, including some members of the medical community who have been promised by the government to be among the first people to get vaccinated.

On social media, questions about the vaccine's efficacy and safety emerged as netizens pointed to an absence of data on it. Other vaccines have disclosed their efficacy claims from ongoing final-stage clinical trials.

Internet personality and medical school graduate Tirta Hudhi aka dr. Tirta expressed his concern over the efficacy and safety of the vaccine. In a Twitter post of his that has been retweeted over 100 times, he asked officials to get vaccinated before medical workers.

A doctor working at a COVID-19 referral hospital in Jakarta who asked to be identified only as Robby said that he expected medical workers to be administered only with vaccines that had evident reports of efficacy, rather than ending up with “a pig in a poke”.

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