Thailand
Indonesian businesses join jab drive
More than 9,000 private companies in Indonesia are gearing up to inoculate their employees and their family members in a bid to revive productivity that has been severely curtailed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The move follows government approval to allow them to purchase vaccines from a state-sanctioned importer as long as they provide the jabs for free for their workforce.
The vaccination programme, expected to begin in mid-April, would initially cover about 7.5 million individuals registered so far for the Gotong Royong (mutual cooperation) campaign that the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce (Kadin) proposed to the government.
“We have business entities of all sizes from almost all sectors signing up for this inoculation scheme, from small and medium enterprises that registered as few as five individuals to big corporations listing 480,000 people,” Kadin chairman Rosan Roeslani told Asia Focus.
The only catch is that participating businesses have to find vaccines from producers other than Sinovac, AstraZeneca, Novavax and Pfizer. Those four companies are the ones from which the government has secured supplies for its free national vaccine drive, said Siti Nadia Tarmizi, the spokesperson for the Covid-19 vaccination programme at the Ministry of Health.
The vaccines will have to first obtain emergency use authorisation from the Food and Drugs Monitoring Agency and a halal certificate from the ulemma council — an essential seal of approval in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation.
Mr Roeslani said the programme aims to eventually inoculate about 30 million individuals. At least 20 million vaccine doses are to be acquired initially from Chinese state-owned Sinopharm and the American biotechnology company Moderna through the state-owned pharmaceutical holding company Bio Farma, which the government has designated as the sole importer of all Covid-19 vaccine brands that Indonesia procures.
“It is a done deal,” Mr Roeslani said, referring to talks with the two foreign vaccine manufacturers. The current plan calls for 15 million doses to come from Sinopharm and 5.2 million from Moderna.
He said the first shipments of vaccines were scheduled to arrive this month, with inoculations to start in mid-April. Also in the pipeline is the Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine, after the manufacturer committed that Indonesia would be able to import the vaccine this year.
The plan has drawn criticism from public health experts, who say that vaccines remain a scarce global commodity. There is also the risk that company employees and their family members would be seen as queue-jumpers ahead of priority population groups, such as the elderly and frontline public workers.
Dicky Budiman, an Indonesian epidemiologist at Griffith University in Australia, said the government should not rely on the private sector to run public services such as a mass vaccination drive.
Pandu Riono, an epidemiologist at the University of Indonesia, said that although public-private partnerships are common in public health initiatives, it should still be the government that runs the programme.
“The private sector can assist the government by just providing their resources to the programme and letting the government operate it,” Mr Riono said.
But Mr Roeslani said the programme would be a “dual track” effort that runs in parallel with that of the government. He also affirmed that employees of participating businesses and their families would get the vaccine for free.
“We are not buying the vaccines to commercialise them, but we want to help accelerate the national inoculation drive,” he said.
In addition to providing jabs to their employees, there are mining companies that have proposed to inoculate people in communities in the areas where they operate, since their staff interact closely with local residents, he added.
In any case, the government will closely monitor the implementation of the parallel vaccination drive. Authorities would make sure that the jabs would remain free for their employees and no companies should not charge them for vaccines later on, national Covid-19 task force spokesman Wiku Adisasmito said, responding to a question from Asia Focus in an online briefing last Monday.
The government began its vaccine drive in mid-January with Sinovac’s CoronaVac vaccine, which requires two jabs. As of March 10, about 1.2 million people in the healthcare sector had received their second jab. Initial shots have also been given to 3.5 million people from targeted groups including the elderly, public transport drivers, those working in Bali’s tourism sector, shop owners at Tanah Abang, Southeast Asia’s largest textile and garment wholesale market; lecturers and teachers, clerics and journalists.
Indonesia aims to inoculate 181.5 million out of its 270 million population within this year in order to create herd immunity.
The business entities, notably those in the labour-intensive industries, expect to see productivity pick up speed after they inoculate their workforce, even as they continue to comply with restrictions in accordance with health protocols and government directives. “But we hope to be able to resume productivity closer to the pre-pandemic levels,” said Mr Roeslani.
The private-sector scheme could help to stabilise productivity, which has often been disrupted by infections among workers, agreed Bahlil Lahadalia, chairman of the Investment Coordinating Board (BKPM), which has set a target of 900 trillion rupiah (US$62 billion) in investment realisation this year.
“It is the gateway to boost foreign investors’ trust and the domestic business community’s confidence in improving productivity,” he said in response to a question from Asia Focus during a virtual briefing held last Wednesday.
Unlike many countries that ordered a full lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus, Indonesia opted to impose measures based on the severity of infections of each region. These large-scale social restrictions have been gradually loosened since they were first imposed in Jakarta and its satellite cities in April last year.
The central government at the end of 2020 introduced another virus containment measure that imposed restrictions at a micro, or community, neighbourhood and village level.
While government officials have claimed that their approach was able to lower the number of infections, it has not led to the kind of significant drop that experts say would amount to “flattening the curve”. There have been consistent rebounds in confirmed infection cases following each holiday season when people travelled.
Doni Monardo, head of the national Covid-19 task force, said last Tuesday that the highest number of active cases that Indonesia registered at any one time was 176,000, and it had dropped to 144,213 as of March 10, with cumulative confirmed cases approaching 1.4 million.
In recent weeks, an average of 6,000 new cases have been reported daily. The country has recorded 38,000 deaths, for a fatality rate of 2.7%, which is more than the world average of nearly 2%.
Mr Monardo acknowledged that a full lockdown would have been “far more effective” in curbing the outbreak, but the high economic cost that entails made the government choose semi-lockdown measures instead.
Source: https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/2083731/indonesian-businesses-join-jab-drive