Indonesia Among Top Five Countries with Highest Vaccination Coverage

TheIndonesia.co - Indonesia is listed among the top five nations with the highest COVID-19 vaccination coverage, alongside China, India, the United States, and Brazil, Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin stated.

"Based on Our World in Data, as of January 4, 2022, Indonesia has injected 281,574,183 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. This has brought Indonesia to rank as one of the five countries with the highest vaccination coverage in the world," Sadikin noted in a statement here Friday, January 7, 2022.

As of Thursday (Jan 6), some 167,999,777 people had received a single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, 115,554,584 were administered two doses of the vaccine, and 1,297,372 people were given three doses of the vaccine.

Sadikin affirmed that the government had intensified vaccination drives to achieve the target of vaccinating 208.2 million people by March or April 2022.

The minister spoke of having ensured adequate stocks of the COVID-19 vaccine in the country even after the vaccination targets increased following the government's decision to vaccinate children aged six to 11 years and administer a third dose of the vaccine injection.

"Now, we have around 140 million doses of vaccine stocks. We are targeting (to administer the COVID-19 vaccine) to 50 million targets in a month. We have also readied booster vaccination as a precautionary measure against Omicron. We can ensure that the stock is safe," he affirmed.

The minister reminded that COVID-19 still poses a threat to the community and emphasized the importance of implementing health protocols and swiftly completing vaccination in order to achieve herd immunity.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has set a vaccination target of 10 percent of the population in each country by September 2021, 40 percent of the population in each country by the end of 2021, and 70 percent of the world's population by mid-2022.