Health Ministry and CEPI Hold Pandemic Simulation, Test 100-Day Vaccine Production

RRI.CO.ID, Jakarta - Indonesia's Ministry of Health and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) held a preparedness simulation on Thursday, September 9, 2026 in Jakarta to test the country's response to a potential new pandemic threat, dubbed "Disease X." Through a Tabletop Exercise (TTX) called the 100-Day Mission, the government assessed how quickly national systems could develop and produce a vaccine within 100 days of a new pathogen being identified.

The two-day simulation brought together more than 120 experts from government ministries and agencies, academia, industry, research institutions, and regulatory authorities. Participants worked through a fictional outbreak scenario involving "Nipah-X," a mutated pathogen originating from livestock that spreads rapidly to humans through direct contact. The hypothetical pathogen was also depicted as capable of human-to-human transmission, giving it the potential to trigger a full-blown pandemic.

Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin, stressed that pandemic preparedness should be treated on par with national defense investment. "Pandemics have claimed more lives than wars," he said.

He noted that history has shown deadly disease outbreaks can devastate global populations even more severely than armed conflict. "The Black Death is estimated to have killed around 200 million people, more than the death toll of World War II. That's why we must invest in health the way we invest in defense, to save lives," Minister Budi said.

The 100-Day Mission is an ambitious global target to shorten vaccine development timelines, enabling an earlier response that can help prevent a disease from spreading further. To pursue that goal, Indonesia is working to integrate an early-detection ecosystem, ranging from developing portable rapid-testing devices (Point-of-Care Testing/POCT) for primary healthcare facilities to expanding genome sequencing capacity across the country.

CEPI Chief Executive Officer Dr. Richard Hatchett, said Indonesia plays a vital role in regional health security, citing the country's research capacity, manufacturing base, and regulatory system as strong enough to support the 100-Day Mission target. "Indonesia is a strategic partner for CEPI. Exercises like this help build relationships and operational readiness, and identify the gaps that need to be closed so the response to the next outbreak can be much faster," He said.

Meanwhile, Head of Indonesia's Food and Drug Authority (BPOM), Taruna Ikrar, assured that accelerating emergency vaccine approvals would not come at the expense of patient safety standards. BPOM is currently finalizing a conditional-approval scheme to complement its existing Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) mechanism. "Accelerating innovation must go hand in hand with meeting standards of safety, quality, and efficacy. Speed must never mean compromising those standards," Taruna said.

With this exercise, Indonesia becomes the third country in the world, after South Korea and Rwanda, to comprehensively test its entire pandemic response chain with CEPI, spanning from biosurveillance to medical logistics distribution.