Ensuring fair and equitable access to the COVID-19 vaccines
UNICEF and partners will coordinate and support the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines across Indonesia.
The COVID-19 pandemic has upended countless lives around the world. In Indonesia, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases has exceeded one million with over 30,000 deaths, the most in Southeast Asia.
While children have been largely spared from the worst health impacts of the virus, they will bear its consequences for years. The pandemic has disrupted their education, health, nutrition and protection. It is affecting their mental health and pushing their families into poverty.
But there is hope. With the development of effective COVID-19 vaccines and continued strengthening of public health measures, an end to the pandemic is in sight. Inoculating the world against COVID-19 will be the largest vaccine procurement and supply operation in history and will require unprecedented global collaboration between governments, manufacturers and multilateral partners.
How is UNICEF supporting the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in Indonesia?
Indonesia has launched one of the world’s largest immunization campaigns with the aim of vaccinating 181.5 million people – two-thirds of its population – within 15 months. Introducing the vaccines across the world’s largest archipelago will pose enormous challenges to fragile health systems that have been further weakened by the pandemic.
As the largest single vaccine buyer in the world, UNICEF has decades of experience mobilizing lifesaving supplies for children. Together with the World Health Organization (WHO) and other key partners, UNICEF will support the Government to receive and deploy the COVID-19 vaccines to communities in all 34 provinces.
COVAX Facility
The Government of Indonesia has ordered COVID-19 vaccines from several companies as well as through the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access (COVAX) Facility, a global initiative formed to ensure fair and equitable access for every country in the world. Indonesia is included in COVAX’s Advanced Market Commitment (AMC) category, guaranteeing the country will have access to affordable and quality COVID-19 vaccines for 20 per cent of the at-risk population by the end of 2021.
UNICEF is leading efforts to procure and supply doses of the COVID-19 vaccines on behalf of the COVAX Facility through its Supply Division in Copenhagen – the largest humanitarian warehouse in the world. By pooling procurement requests for nearly 140 countries, UNICEF can order high volumes at reduced costs that will lead to significant savings. UNICEF is also facilitating discussions with the Government and the COVAX Facility to determine prices and the timing of vaccine supplies.
Strategy support
Distributing the COVID-19 vaccines from Jakarta to more than 10,000 health facilities around Indonesia – some in remote areas with limited transportation, infrastructure and resources – will present logistical challenges for local governments. Effective coordination at both the national and subnational levels will be crucial to ensure that enough vaccines are delivered when and where they are needed.
Through a network of technical staff and consultants embedded at the national level and in field offices across the country, UNICEF is providing assistance in all 34 provinces for strategic guidance, training, planning, budgeting and implementation of the vaccine rollout. In addition, UNICEF is supporting local governments to forecast their immunization needs and procure vaccines and supplies. UNICEF is also supporting authorities to improve existing supply chains and identify regulatory challenges to vaccine procurement.
Cold chain capacity building
Vaccines must be kept in a limited temperature range from the time they are manufactured until the moment of vaccination. Temperatures that are too high or too low can cause the vaccine to lose its potency – its ability to protect against disease. Once a vaccine loses its potency, it cannot be regained or restored. Delivering vaccines therefore requires a cold chain: a system of precisely coordinated events in temperature-controlled environments to store, manage and transport them.
UNICEF is providing technical assistance to strengthen Indonesia’s cold chain so that the country has adequate infrastructure to transport and store the vaccines for delivery and health workers trained to dispense them. UNICEF is also collaborating with the Ministry of Health to engage the private sector to address gaps in the cold chain system.
Risk communication and community engagement
While child immunization is widely accepted in Indonesia, vaccine hesitancy has been on the rise. Halal concerns, mistrust, and fear of multiple injections have shaken public confidence and hampered previous immunization campaigns. Misinformation about the COVID-19 virus and vaccines have further aggravated these issues. Fear of contracting COVID-19 and the disruption of routine health services have also led to a sharp decline in child immunization coverage.
UNICEF will work to reinforce public trust in vaccines through the delivery of vaccine confidence communications, media monitoring and outreach, and engagement with community, religious and youth organizations in high-risk areas. To address misinformation, UNICEF is helping to maintain a national website as a high-quality source of authoritative information and partnering with Facebook and civil society groups to unravel hoax networks and disseminate tailored messaging on social media. And to prevent outbreaks of diseases such as measles and polio, UNICEF is expanding community outreach efforts so that parents and caregivers are aware that routine health services are safe and still available in public facilities.
Data and analytics
As Indonesia rolls out its COVID-19 vaccination programme, it plans to prioritize front-line workers, public servants, the elderly and the sick – groups that are not the usual beneficiaries of childhood immunization campaigns. To ensure equity in vaccine access, tailored real-time monitoring systems are being specifically designed for the COVID-19 vaccine campaign to register beneficiaries, track coverage and identify gaps.
UNICEF will support the design and introduction of a targeting and monitoring platform for COVID-19 immunization, using existing data on front-line workers and a national database from the health insurance agency (BPJS). This will require adapting established real-time monitoring platforms to enable beneficiary registration, the collection of appropriate data, second dose reminders, daily feedback to vaccinators and managers and data-coverage visualization through a purpose-built online dashboard.
With every round of vaccination, a return to normalcy becomes a stronger reality. With every vaccine dose, more people are protected. With every teacher vaccinated, more children have the potential to return to school.