COVID-19 and Vaccine Hesitancy: A Story Behind the Silver Bullet
By: Aisyah Rahvy
Tags: Pandemic, Indonesia, Vaccination, Vaccine Hesitancy, Covid 19

Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash

Written by: Aisyah P Rahvy, a student in the Department of Health Administration and Policy, Faculty of Public Health, Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia

Up until now, Indonesia has been fighting COVID-19 pandemic since the beginning of 2020. From dealing with 2 first cases until 700,097 cases on 23rd December 2020, all of the efforts have been done by the government to make things better. Social distancing regulation, health promotion, anything to educate society and raise their awareness so that efforts done by the government will not be in vain.

Lately, the idea of vaccination to help us win the battle has been legally implemented through Permenkes (Peraturan Menteri Kesehatan, Ministry of Health Regulation) Number 84 the Year 2020. As we all know, vaccination is considered as a “holy grail” of preventive action, especially for diseases caused by virus. President Joko Widodo, on 16th December 2020, announced that there would be six vaccines used in Indonesia: Bio Farma, Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, Sinopharm, Oxford-AstraZeneca, dan Sinovac (Kompas.com). To maximize utilization of the vaccines, government rules some groups of the society those will have to be vaccinated as an obligatory. These groups include health worker, military soldiers, police officers, teachers, and more. But still, good intention is not always being followed by good response.

As IDI (Ikatan Dokter Indonesia) claimed to be ready if doctors must be vaccinated first as well as other health workforce, we should take a deeper look to other parts of society. Can anyone guarantee that other parts of our society will be just fine about this vaccination? Well, the term of vaccine hesitancy is not a fresh issue here in Indonesia. Vaccine hesitancy is defined by WHO (World Health Organization) as delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccine services. Vaccine hesitancy often be the greatest barrier of immunization coverage, and at the same time increase the risk of people being infected by certain virus if they refuse to be vaccinated. Wellcome Global Monitor, a survey from Wellcome Trust, in 2018 found that Indonesia is among countries with the lowest coverage of immunization in ASEAN. One of the reason this ironic fact happened was because some of the parents did not believe in vaccine.

Talking about the pandemic, it is so possible that our people will refuse the idea of vaccination. Several reasons like religious issue, safety issue, conspiracy theory, hoax news, and many more lead to vaccine hesitancy. Religious law like haram halal of vaccine materials usually be the main reason why certain religious groups deny the idea of vaccine. Furthermore, vaccine safety is still being questioned of some parts of society. Is it really okay to be vaccinated, will the vaccine cause no side-effect, and many more questions about it. At the same time, conspiracy theory and hoax news about COVID-19 vaccination program is spreading everywhere. A conspiracy theory about vaccine once says that vaccine contains microchips to control and track human, other theory says the vaccine is purposely made to destroy some population of human. Funny and dumb? Maybe yes for us as scientists, but for society, this is a mighty idea to believe in.

Let us imagine this scenario. If this vaccine hesitancy keeps raising, some of our people will refuse to be vaccinated and it will higher their risk of being infected by a coronavirus. Meanwhile, there are still a lot of people who do not obey social distancing regulation even when the government already formed the punishment. These people are truly making it harder to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2. In this kind of situation, vaccine is more like a silver bullet to make this pandemic end. But what happen if the people use vaccine hesitancy as a bullet-proof vest? Virus will still spread rapidly while most of people do not have immunity to fight it.

The government should really keep an eye for this issue. Unclear information about halal haram as well as safety issue of vaccine must be communicated well, unless it will trigger society to believe on conspiracy theory and hoax news as it is in line with their own faith and believe upon vaccine. Transparent information, on the other side, will increase people’s trust to the government so that they unlikely have negative sentiment to vaccination idea. Along with this, government also has to show strong commitment as well as consistency between regulation and its implementation by governmental actors in combating COVID-19. Social distancing applies to all people in society including government, and the same goes with vaccination. Inconsistency between regulation and implementation done by government will significantly raise people’s distrust and reluctance to government’s regulation and policy. This is what good implementation should be: no governmental actor is excluded from obeying the regulation and policy.

Last but not the least, all of us are in charged to end this pandemic even if it takes us to be vaccinated. Well, I believe that providing silver bullets is such a ridiculous thing to waste if no one wants to use it to kill the enemy.