President wants to accelerate efforts to reach herd immunity by year-end JAKARTA: Private sector companies in Indonesia on Tuesday began inoculating employees against COVID-19 with a paid-for vaccine plan aimed at boosting productivity and accelerating the government’s free, nationwide vaccination drive. The plan was finally rolled out four months after President Joko Widodo — in a January meeting with the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce (Kadin) — introduced the idea for the private sector to carry out and pay for its own vaccination drive, Kadin chairman Rosan Roeslani said. “We discussed with the president on how to quickly reach herd immunity. The president came up with this idea, and the business community responded positively,” Roeslani told Arab News. Widodo rolled out the private vaccination drive during a visit to a Unilever Indonesia plant in an industrial zone of Cikarang, West Java province. The company began inoculating its employees along with 16 other companies and two private vaccination centers for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) from industrial zones around Jakarta. Unilever, and 16 other labor-intensive companies began administering the jab on Tuesday. There are also two centers for MSMEs that do not have their own premises for carrying out vaccinations. Roeslani said 22,736 companies had registered to inoculate more than 10 million people through the private vaccination scheme, which the chamber coordinated. The companies registered in the program have to buy the vaccine from Kimia Farma, a subsidiary of the state-owned vaccine manufacturer Bio Farma, which the government assigned to import the vaccines for private companies. The Health Ministry has capped the price for a single dose of China’s Sinopharm vaccine at $35, but participating companies cannot charge their employees for it. Widodo said Indonesia had secured 420,000 Sinopharm doses out of the committed 30 million for private inoculation. Other vaccines to be used for the private companies are China’s CanSino, while negotiations are underway for Russia’s Sputnik V. HIGHLIGHT The plan was finally rolled out four months after President Joko Widodo introduced the idea for the private sector to carry out and pay for its own vaccination drive. “It is really difficult to secure vaccines nowadays, with 215 countries around the world competing to get them,” Widodo said during an exchange with vaccine recipients from other companies via video conference. “You are among the lucky ones to get the jab today. We hope by August or September, we will have inoculated 70 million people and the curve will be flattened by then so that the manufacturing plants can resume normal operations.” Iswar Deni, the corporate secretary of garment manufacturer Pan Brothers, said the company had started to inoculate 1,000 out of 3,000 people it had registered. “We are inoculating those at the supervisor and higher up level since they are the ones with high mobility to manage production operations, as well as those at the front line such as security personnel, internal COVID-19 task force members and labor union committee members,” he told Arab News. Indonesia aims to vaccinate 181.5 million people or 70 percent of its 270 million population to develop herd immunity by the end of 2021. As of Tuesday, nearly 14 million people had received their first jab, while 9.2 million have had the second dose of China’s Sinovac and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines which the government used in its national drive. Accelerating the number of people being vaccinated is timely as Indonesia is facing the prospect of increased infections after the Eid Al-Fitr holiday, when people gathered in large numbers during the festivities and flocked to markets during the last days of Ramadan for Eid shopping.