Seventy-six percent of respondents to a recent survey said they would be unwilling to pay for a COVID-19 vaccine.
recent poll by the Indonesian Survey Institute (LSI) has found that the government’s recently cancelled plan to allow self-funded inoculation did not enjoy widespread enthusiasm.
The survey was conducted from June 20 to 25, before the government announced that it had scrapped the self-paid plan last week following public outcry. LSI interviewed 1,200 respondents living throughout the country by telephone for the survey.
Seventy-six percent of the respondents said they would not be willing to pay for a COVID-19 vaccine, while 23 percent said they would.
LSI executive director Djayadi Hanan said during a live-streamed webinar on Sunday that the data corresponded to the strong response from the public prior to the cancellation of the plan.
Read also: Self-paid vaccine plan sparks anger
More than 80 percent of the respondents said they had not received a first COVID-19 vaccine dose, and 63.6 percent of that group said they were willing to be inoculated. Some 36 percent of the unvaccinated respondents said they would refuse to be inoculated, citing potential side effects from the vaccines as their biggest concern.
“Our current biggest task is to persuade those who are hesitant about the vaccine, whether they are refusing but unsure or accepting but unsure, so that they can be confident about the vaccine” Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology head Amin Soebandrio said in the same webinar.
The country’s vaccination program is divided into two parts: the national vaccination campaign, conducted by the government, and the business-funded Gotong Royong scheme, which allows private and state-owned companies to purchase vaccine supplies from the government to inoculate workers and their family members. Both programs are free of charge for the participants.
Some 87 percent of the respondents said they supported the Gotong Royong scheme, while 4.8 percent rejected the scheme and 7.9 percent did not answer the question.
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