VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

The Indonesian government is accelerating a vaccination program to address the prolonged Covid-19 pandemic and reduce the severity of the Covid-19 outbreak. However, the distribution of vaccination programs in a number of regions in Indonesia faces problems. In fact, vaccination is one of the major keys in handling the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on experience in a number of countries, the higher the ratio of the population gets vaccinated, the lower the fatality rate is.

The government has also intensified the vaccination program to achieve the target of at least 70% of the total population in order to create herd immunity.

Based on data from the Ministry of Health (Kemenkes), which was released on the Kemenkes.go.id on Thursday (29/7), only 44.6 million people have been vaccinated. This number is equivalent to 16.5% of Indonesia's total population of 270.2 million people in 2020. Meanwhile, 17.9 million people have received the second vaccination or 6.6% of the population.

Logistics problem is also another factor of inequality, because not all Public Health Centers or Puskesmas throughout Indonesia have logistics that support the vaccination program. The limited number of vaccinators is also the reason why the vaccination coverage in Indonesia is uneven. Until now, the Ministry of Health has not specifically released data on the number of corona vaccinators in all provinces. However, the distribution of the number of vaccinators can be estimated from the current data on health workers, considering that health workers are the main profession recruited to carry out the vaccination program.

Based on the Ministry of Health's release, Spokesperson for Vaccination of the Ministry of Health, Siti Nadia Tarmizi admitted that the supply of vaccines was limited, only 30 percent or 151.9 million of the total need for around 462 million doses and there were still various obstacles, especially related to vaccine distribution. Thus, all stakeholders need to join hands and work hard to overcome this.

Hopefully, all of the problems, ranging from vaccine distribution and logistical readiness, especially the limited number of vaccinators, must be addressed and minimized to ensure that corona vaccination is evenly distributed throughout Indonesia. In addition, the determination of the priority scale for regions that receive vaccines, namely in areas with a high number of transmission cases can be resolved. Thus, the herd immunity target set by the government can be achieved immediately.