NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF FREE COVID-19 VACCINE POLICY BY THE GOVERNMENT OF INDONESIA

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread to many countries in the world and one of them is Indonesia. In this regard, the government's effort to suppress the pandemic is to create herd immunity by initiating a free COVID-19 vaccine program. During the socialization, the government issued a communication narrative through official media from the Commission for the Handling of COVID-19 and the National Economic Recovery, abbreviated as KPC-PEN. This paper used a rhetorical theory with a narrative paradigm from Fisher to analyze that narrative communication through PSAs and press conference video. The videos made by government to counter public distrust about vaccine safety, vaccine effectiveness, vaccines program distrust, vaccine side effects, and the vaccine rejection due to religious reasons. This study has a constructivist paradigm, with a descriptive qualitative approach and literature study research methods. As a result, the public perception of the 'rationalization narrative' and 'fidelity narrative' of government communications about COVID-19-free vaccines is still weak. For this reason, the government needs to fix the concept of policy narrative communication if it wants the free COVID-19 vaccine program to run on its target. This is a preliminary study to analyze the narrative of the Government of the Republic of Indonesia in the COVID-19 free vaccine program.