TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Refugees in North Sumatra express relief as they receive COVID-19 vaccine
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.
Change Size
To the test: An East Aceh Health Agency official takes a swab sample for a COVID-19 antigen test from a Rohingya refugee at a shelter on Idaman Island, Simpang Ulim district, East Aceh regency, Aceh, on June 9. Indonesian authorities are relocating 81 Rohingya refugees who arrived by boat on the shores of Aceh province to Medan, North Sumatra. (Antara/Hayaturrahmah)
A
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.
