Lessons learned from COVID-19 vaccination in Indonesia: experiences, challenges, and opportunities

Abstract

ABSTRACT The development of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines as well as their delivery to people’s arms are the best hope for ending the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the implementation of vaccination varies greatly across countries, with the developing countries lagging behind. This study investigates Indonesia’s vaccination experiences, challenges, and acceleration over the course of implementation period. This study provides simulations to estimate the vaccination rate using time-series forecasting machine learning. We use Administrative data and Survey results in our analysis. Our findings suggest limited vaccine availability had caused low-coverage vaccination implementation in the early stage of vaccination implementation period. However, following the increased availability of vaccine, the vaccination rate accelerates up to 600% times. The government of Indonesia utilized strategic public places, public and private offices, and engaging private sectors in the phase two implementation to accelerate the vaccination implementation. Indonesia might reach 63.1 million individuals vaccinated at the end of March 2022, or 35% of the targeted population with up to April 2021 vaccination rate. To accelerate, government introduced a number of new strategies including door-to-door persuasion through neighborhood association (RT), educating individuals, and providing transportation from their home to the vaccination facility. We expect new strategies could further improve vaccination speed by around 1.4 million to 3.5 million individuals per day.