Japan’s vaccination program to contain the new coronavirus entered the second stage on April 12 as people 65 or older began to receive the shots.

The central government’s plan to give each senior citizen the two required doses in about three months is facing tough challenges. The central and local governments need to work closely together to ensure steady progress in the program.

Local governments adopt different procedures for the administration of vaccines to local residents. All the various methods have both advantages and disadvantages.

The question is which of these approaches will best ensure safe and efficient vaccinations. As they try to improve their procedures in response to the local conditions, prefectural and municipal administrations should share information with each other and learn lessons from others.

One of the key challenges at the moment is to secure doctors and nurses as well as vaccination sites. Even though health care workers started receiving vaccines in February, only about 10 percent of the 4.8 million people working in the sector have so far been vaccinated twice.

It is necessary to monitor whether the expansion of the program to inoculate senior citizens will cause any problems for efforts to immunize health care workers.

The work to input data into the two systems used by the central government to keep track of progress in the vaccination program also represents a hurdle that cannot be ignored.

In a survey of the governments of cities across the nation and Tokyo’s 23 wards conducted by the Japan Association of City Mayors, some 70 percent of the respondents cited the sharing of the workload with medical institutions as an issue to be addressed.

The central government needs to pay serious attention to such feedback from local administrations and make necessary improvements.

But the biggest obstacle to progress in the vaccination program is the difficulty of securing sufficient doses of approved vaccines. Since there is no prospect that a domestically developed vaccine will become available in the near future, Japan’s efforts to inoculate its population will remain dependent on imported vaccines, at least for the time being.

The government claims that necessary doses to vaccinate senior citizens will be secured by the end of June. But local governments have yet to be told when and how many doses they will receive.

This leaves many local officials uncertain whether they should proceed with their vaccination work or wait for a while longer to see how things will pan out.

Previously, the government said it would seek to secure the necessary doses to immunize the entire nation during the first half of this year. But it now seems difficult to meet the goal.

As Japan has fallen behind most other major industrial nations in the global vaccination race, people are voicing discontent and asking questions.

To be fair, the government’s vaccination plan has been hampered by a scramble among nations to get their hands on vaccine doses. But it needs to step up negotiations to obtain more doses more quickly and explain the situation in detail to the public.

It is possible that COVID-19 may require regular vaccinations in the same way as the seasonal flu. That is why the government needs to map out a long-term vaccination strategy to contain outbreaks of the virus including a plan to establish a domestic system to supply sufficient doses.

Developing such a strategy and determining measures the government should take involves weighing the pluses and minuses of various options to answer a range of related questions.

One question is how to carry out large-scale clinical trials in Japan necessary to assess the efficacy and safety of domestically developed vaccines while highly effective foreign vaccines are already available. Another is whether it is possible to manufacture foreign vaccines in Japan under licenses.

Since Japan experienced cases in which side effects of vaccines became a serious social problem, it has long been a major policy challenge to win public understanding and build a national consensus on a nationwide vaccination program.

The COVID-19 pandemic offers an important opportunity for the nation to have a broad and in-depth debate on vaccinations in general.

--The Asahi Shimbun, April 13