Several companies started vaccinating employees in Indonesia under the Gotong Royong private vaccination scheme on May 18, to pick up the slack in the free government programme that has slowed due to limited supplies amid global shortages.

Some 19 companies signed up their employees to participate in the first day of immunisations, with around 40,000 people expected to receive their first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine in the next three days.

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo visited a factory belonging to PT Unilever Indonesia in Jababeka industrial estate in Bekasi, West Java, to oversee the first day of inoculations.

He said the private inoculation scheme could speed up the country’s vaccination drive at a time when vaccines were scarce resources sought out by many countries.

With at least 420,000 doses of the vaccine acquired through the private sector scheme, Jokowi said he expected it to speed up the nation’s target of inoculating 181 million Indonesians – the proportion of its population required to make effective use of herd immunity.

“We expect that this target will be achieved sooner thanks to the Gotong Royong vaccine programme. By August or early September, up to 70 million people should already have been vaccinated,” Jokowi said in a video statement.

The president also said the private scheme would allow industries to operate at normal capacity to assist the country’s economic recovery.

According to official data, Indonesia’s economy contracted 0.74 per cent year-on-year in the first quarter of this year, although economists foresee an improvement on the horizon. The government is aiming for seven per cent growth by the second quarter.

At the same occasion, Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin) chairman Rosan Roeslani said that the private sector had welcomed the idea of the private vaccination scheme ever since it was first introduced.

He said that at least 22,736 companies employing some 10 million people had signed up to the programme.

Companies have also been entertaining the idea of expanding the private scheme beyond employees to account for people who live near the companies’ centres of operations, the Recapital Group chairman said.

“The impact will be positive on businesses, and so Kadin and all [business] associations support the government [in its vaccination efforts],” he said.

As of May 17, only nine million people out of the targeted 38.5 million, which includes 21 million elderly, had been fully vaccinated under the free public vaccination scheme. As such, state and private companies have tried getting their hands on vaccines to inoculate their employees.

According to a ministerial decree issued last week, the health ministry has set the maximum price per dose at 321,660 rupiah ($22.53) and the maximum cost for administering the vaccine at 117,910 rupiah under the private scheme.

As each person must get two jabs of the vaccine for maximum protection, complete vaccinations cost nearly one million rupiah per person.

The private vaccination scheme also employs different vaccine brands from the ones administered by the state.

The government programme uses Sinovac Biotech, Novavax and Pfizer-BioNtech jabs, as well as the recently suspended AstraZeneca vaccine.

The private vaccination scheme will use doses from Sinopharm and later in the future CanSino Biologics, both manufactured in China, according to Bio Farma president director Honesti Basyir, as quoted by Kompas.com.

Bio Farma has signed a contract with Sinopharm to procure 7.5 million doses of its vaccine, beginning with 500,000 doses for 250,000 prospective recipients. The remaining seven million doses are to arrive gradually from May to September of this year.

The government has also instructed the private scheme to prioritise labour-intensive companies located in areas at high risk of Covid-19 transmission. The companies are to cover the cost of vaccination for the participating employees and their families.

However, some critics have raised concerns that the private scheme may risk negating equal access to the vaccine. “[Vaccinations] should be inclusive, but what is happening now is an exclusive scheme,” University of Indonesia epidemiologist Pandu Riono said on May 18.

He warned that the government should not be lulled into thinking that the private scheme would speed up herd immunity, as the latter can only be achieved once all Indonesians are vaccinated.

At the same time, SARS-CoV-2 – the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 – is constantly mutating into more dangerous variants. The private scheme would then serve to exacerbate vaccine quality inequality, should any new research show discrepancies in effectiveness among available vaccine brands.

Most importantly, the scheme prioritises working age people who contribute to the economic recovery.

Pandu told The Jakarta Post: “Vaccines should have been prioritised for vulnerable groups [such as the elderly].”

THE JAKARTA POST/ASIA NEWS NETWORK