Coronavirus: as Widodo kicks off Indonesia’s Sinovac vaccine drive, social media influencer Raffi Ahmad’s shot backfires

Name: Joko Widodo gets first Sinovac vaccine shot as Indonesia starts mass Covid-19 inoculations
Uploaded: 2021-01-13T10:50:52.000Z
Duration: 2 min 24 s
Description: Joko Widodo gets first Sinovac vaccine shot as Indonesia starts mass Covid-19 inoculations

The Indonesian leader was joined by representatives from all walks of life as he received a shot of the Chinese developed vaccine live on TV

But the inclusion of “millennial” representative Raffi Ahmad, who has been criticised for not wearing a mask on television, has been panned on social media

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Raffi Ahmad posts a selfie of himself and Indonesian President Joko Widodo after his inoculation. Photo: Instagram

Resty Woro Yuniar

Published: 6:50pm, 13 Jan 2021Updated: 9:14am, 14 Jan 2021

As President Joko Widodo launched Indonesia’s Covid-19 vaccination drive on Wednesday, the televised images beamed into homes across the nation were rich in symbolism.

Here was the president of the world’s fourth most populous nation quite literally opening his arms to China as he received a shot of the Sinovac Biotech vaccine his government had approved for emergency use just a couple of days earlier.

This was the moment that the Southeast Asian country hit hardest by the novel coronavirus – having recorded nearly 850,000 cases and just short of 25,000 deaths in a little over a year – started its fight back against a global menace. A moment that, as Widodo put it, was needed to provide the “safety of all Indonesian people”, or as Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin more effusively claimed, the safety of not only “families”, “neighbours” and “Indonesians”, but “human civilisation” itself.

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Joko Widodo gets first Sinovac vaccine shot as Indonesia starts mass Covid-19 inoculations

It was fitting then that Widodo was flanked by the great and good of Indonesian society as the first doses were administered. Alongside leaders from the military, police and religious sectors, representatives from all walks of life – health workers, a labourer, a market seller – received jabs in front of the cameras in an exercise designed to win over a public known to be sceptical about vaccines.

Yet on social media there was hint that at least one of these shots may have backfired. And it was nothing to do with the news from Brazil that the jab might only have a clinical efficacy rate of 50.4 per cent, significantly lower than the 65.3 per cent figure suggested by Indonesia’s food and drug agency.

Rather, the commotion was over the choice of one particular representative of Indonesian life.

Raffi Ahmad appears on television in a clip for which he was criticised for wearing only a face shield and not a mask too. Photo: Internet