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Indonesia cautions against ‘vaccine nationalism'
With a population of only about 450 million, the EU has reserved nearly 2.3 billion vaccine doses.
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A health worker receives a COVID-19 vaccine at Cipto Mangunkusumo General Hospital in Central Jakarta on Jan. 21, a day after Indonesia began its mass vaccination program. (JP/Dhoni Setiawan)
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ndonesia has urged the world to not resort to "vaccine nationalism", which it says could limit the global availability of COVID-19 vaccines, after a recent procurement row broke out in Europe.
Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said during an online panel organized by the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Friday that equitable and fair access to vaccines was important not just for developing and least developed countries, but also for developed countries. She said the world would not truly recover from COVID-19 unless all countries recovered.
“So please stop the politicization of vaccines; please stop vaccine nationalism. And we must remind ourselves that vaccines are a humanitarian issue; vaccines are not a political issue,” Retno said.
Indonesia has promoted multilateralism in the search for solutions to the global health crisis as a means to keep nationalism and protectionism at bay.
Retno herself is one of three cochairs of the GAVI COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC), a multilateral COVID-19 vaccine initiative she cited as the type of effort “we need to continuously strengthen" to ensure both rich and poor countries received vaccines simultaneously. The AMC is part of an international collaborative effort called the COVAX Facility, which is seeking to pool and distribute some 2 billion vaccine doses throughout the world. Through the program, Indonesia could receive 13 million to 23 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Read also: Jokowi calls for equal vaccine access in UNGA address
On Saturday, Retno spoke with Seth Berkley of the GAVI vaccine alliance, one of founders of the COVAX Facility, about the rise of vaccine nationalism and its potential to inhibit multilateral vaccine cooperation.
