After months of waiting, Mohammad Noor, a Rohingya refugee who currently stays at the Hotel Pelangi temporary shelter in Medan, North Sumatra, finally received his first COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday.
fter months of waiting, Mohammad Noor, a Rohingya refugee who currently stays at the Hotel Pelangi temporary shelter in Medan, North Sumatra, finally received his first COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday.
He was one of more than a thousand refugees and asylum seekers in Medan who were receiving the first dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine that day, in a vaccination event organized by the Medan Health Agency and the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Indonesia is not a party to the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention and therefore is not obliged to extend to the refugees and asylum seekers in the country the legal protection that it offers to its citizens. This has left them particularly vulnerable to contracting or spreading COVID-19 as the country does not have specific agencies to care for them as they wait, often for years, for their cases to be processed.
Read also: Systemic exclusion leaves refugees vulnerable to COVID-19
Noor said he was happy that he, along with his eight-month pregnant wife, had received the jab, saying that it had eased his concerns over potentially contracting the coronavirus disease.
“We have been waiting too long to get vaccinated, but now it’s no problem because we finally received it [the first COVID-19 vaccine shot]. This has put our mind at ease,” Noor told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.
Noor, however, added that he understood refugees and asylum seekers in the country were unlikely to get vaccines earlier as the Indonesian government’s first priority was to inoculate its own citizens.
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