Total 505 Million Vaccine Doses Received By Indonesia From Partner Countries

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION VIA ANTARA

JAKARTA - Secretary for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Economic Recovery Acceleration Team (TPPE) Lintang Paramitasari said Indonesia had received a total of 505,551,435 doses of COVID-19 vaccine obtained from partner countries through bilateral and multilateral channels.

"This amount can meet 93.6 percent of the total need for a two-dose vaccine for all Indonesian people," Paramita explained, quoted by Antara, Thursday, March 17.

He explained that on March 11, Indonesia again received the vaccine made by Moderna through the COVAX dose sharing scheme from the United States as many as 2,000,880 doses.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, together with other relevant ministries and institutions, strives to continue to carry out vaccine diplomacy to meet domestic vaccine needs, both booster and primary vaccines.

In addition to seeking to fulfill domestic vaccine needs, Indonesia also continues to voice the importance of equal access to the COVID-19 vaccine for all countries in the world.

One of these efforts is through Indonesia's role in the COVAX facility, where Minister of Foreign Affairs Retno Marsudi is the co-chair of the Advanced Market Commitment Engagement Group (AMC EG) facility.

“The Foreign Minister's mandate as co-chair of AMC EG has been extended until the end of 2022 on March 15. The Foreign Minister is again acting as co-chair with the Canadian Minister of International Development and the Ethiopian Minister of Health," said Paramita.

Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi has chaired the second session of the AMC EG meeting which discussed the development of the Omicron variant and the effectiveness of the vaccine. He also re-emphasized the current top priority, namely that COVAX AMC EG strives to meet the WHO vaccination target of 70 percent by mid-2022 for all countries.

"The Foreign Minister also emphasized the importance of the role of AMC EG in bridging the reduction of the gap in access to vaccines considering that there are still a number of AMC EG countries that have not yet reached the 10 percent vaccination rate," he emphasized.