Indonesia’s Strategies in Developing Covid-19 Vaccine: From the Perspectives of Moderate Vaccine Nationalism, Vaccine Science Diplomacy, And Self-reliance

The COVID-19 pandemic that emerged in early 2020 has transformed the global political landscape. This is due to its significant impact, notably which resulting the highest death toll compared to previous global pandemics, like Spanish Flu in 1918. Preventing more devastating consequences, most international actor, either state or non-state, have made their best efforts to combat the pandemic. One crucial initiative during the health crisis is by developing COVID-19 vaccine. Indonesia is one of the countries that actively initiating breakthroughs in doing so. Although it was not ambitiously pursuing to be among the first country to find the vaccine, but as middle power country, Indonesia has persistently attempted to make innovations, including establishing 6 frameworks for the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. Among the six schemes, five of them are national research-based activities conducted by universities and research institutes; meanwhile, there is one project that representing a collaboration between Indonesia’s state-owned pharmacist company, Biofarma and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), United States. Therefore, this paper analyzes Indonesia’s strategy in developing COVID-19 vaccine. The approach used in this study is multidisciplinary referring to medicine and international relations. The theoretical frameworks that employed in this paper are including vaccine development, vaccine nationalism, vaccine science diplomacy, and self-reliance. Therefore, this paper argues that Indonesia focuses on, first, moderate vaccine nationalism which encourages the country to start domestic vaccine development. This becomes Indonesia’s general approach to develop vaccine during Covid-19 pandemic. Second, Indonesia collaborates with other foreign actors through vaccine science diplomacy as inevitable path to establish new national architecture of vaccine production. Third, Indonesia applies self-reliant approach because it is feasible for Indonesia to develop COVID-19 based on its own capacity.

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