VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

Mar. 8 - Indonesia ranks second in the fastest vaccination in ASEAN.

Quoting Reuters, Sunday (7/3/2021), a vaccination race is inevitable because vaccination is the key to breaking the chain of the pandemic, which in turn will again accelerate the pace of the economy of each country.
There are at least five vaccines that are popularly used: Pfizer (the United States / US), Sinovac (China), AstraZeneca (Europe), Sputnik (Russia), Novavax (US), and Johnson & Johnson (US).

Apart from that, there is the Covax vaccine developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to suppress the egocentrism effect of developed countries in fighting over vaccines. Most recently, Italy blocked the delivery of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine to Australia.

The pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca requested permission to ship 250,000 doses of vaccines from its factory in Anagni, Italy. However, the Italian government refused the request.

In the midst of such competition, President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) is optimistic that vaccination in Indonesia can be completed in 1 year. He ordered Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin to speed up the vaccination process.

"I have also ordered the vaccination process for approximately 181.5 million Indonesians to be completed before the end of 2021," he said some time ago in an official statement uploaded on the Youtube channel of the Presidential Secretariat.

Currently, Indonesia has received a supply of 11.7 million additional vaccines for the second phase of vaccination. According to the Ministry of Health, the government this year targets to secure 340.5 million doses of vaccine from five brands, namely Sinovac (125.5 million), AstraZeneca (59 million), Covax (54 million), Novavax (52 million), and Pfizer (50 million). million).

By the first quarter of 2022, it is expected that there will be an additional 86.3 million doses of vaccine from the five producers. Thus, during that period, it is expected that 426.8 million doses of vaccine will be collected to be given to 260 million Indonesians.

It is known that the Covid-19 vaccination using the Sinovac vaccine from China is carried out through two stages of injection. Recipients of the second injection, number is equivalent to 0.4 percent of the total population in Indonesia. Still very small.

In comparison, Singapore has currently injected phase two vaccines into its 215,000 citizens, or the equivalent of 3.7 percent of its population. This places the City State at the top of the country with the fastest vaccination rates in the Region.

However, Indonesia's vaccination performance deserves thumbs up because so far it has only lost compared to Singapore.

In fact, Indonesia is the country with the most populous population in Southeast Asia. According to the records of Our World in Data, Indonesia is better positioned than the five ASEAN member countries in terms of the number of injections per 100 population. (RRI)