About 41% of the world’s seafaring workforce has been COVID-vaccinated, according to the latest data from the Neptune Declaration’s Crew Change Indicator.
The Neptune Declaration is an agreement subscribed to by about 850 organizations that are urging the end of the crew change crisis.
The Neptune Declaration Crew Change Indicator provides up-to-date information on the crew change situation. The Indicator is published once a month and is based on data from major ship managers across all the key segments.
In August 2021, when the Neptune Declaration began tracking seafarer COVID vaccinations, about 15.3% of the world seafaring workforce had been vaccinated. That has now risen by 25.7 percentage points to 41% in November 2021. Of particular interest is that the rate of vaccinations appears to be speeding up: every month after August has not only shown that more seafarers have been vaccinated but that the percentage point change from the previous month has increased too.
“The data shows that seafarer vaccinations are progressing with vaccine programs being established in numerous countries to offer vaccines to international seafarers,” the Neptune Declaration said.
However, by way of comparison, it pointed to the vaccination rates for the general population in various countries e.g. 75% across the whole European Union; Hong Kong 59% and Japan 71% among others.
The participating ship managers also highlighted what they perceive to be vaccination problems:
- seafarers have limited access to vaccines in leading maritime crew nations such as the Philippines
- due to a lack of international standards on vaccine approvals, “many seafarers” are being vaccinated multiple times with different vaccines
