2024-07-15 11:32:55
Child vaccination rates around the world have stagnated and have yet to return to pre-Covid-19 pandemic levels, the United Nations warned on Monday.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a joint statement that 2.7 million children will still be unvaccinated or incompletely vaccinated in 2023 compared with 2019 levels before the pandemic.
“Latest trends show that many countries are still neglecting too many children,” lamented UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell.
By 2023, only 84%, or 108 million, of children in the age group due to receive the vaccine have actually received three doses of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTP) vaccine, with the third dose key to global vaccination rates logo.
The UN agency stressed that this percentage has not changed since 2022, meaning that the modest progress observed that year has “stood still” following a sharp decline caused by the Covid-19 crisis.
Before the pandemic in 2019, the rate was 86%.
” late”
“We’re late,” Kate O’Brien, head of the World Health Organization’s vaccination arm, admitted to the media.
“Global vaccination coverage has yet to fully recover from the historic decline observed during the pandemic,” she explained.
Data released on Monday showed that in 2023, 14.5 million children globally were so-called “zero doses” – they did not receive any dose of vaccine, a number that has continued to increase since 13.9 million in 2022 and 12.8 million in 2019.
Kate O’Brien warned: “This puts the lives of the most vulnerable children at risk.”
Half of the world’s unvaccinated children live in 31 conflict-affected countries, where they are particularly at risk of certain preventable diseases due to insecurity and insufficient access to food and health services.
In these countries, children are also more likely to miss needed booster doses.
Globally, 6.5 million children have not received the third dose of DTP vaccine, which is necessary to ensure effective protection.
These differences in vaccination coverage favor the development of certain diseases such as measles.
Pay attention to measles
The World Health Organization and Unicef have expressed concern regarding delays in vaccination once morest measles, one of the most contagious diseases in a global epidemic.
“The measles outbreak is a warning sign of existing vaccination gaps, which affects the most vulnerable first,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.
In 2023, 83% of children globally will receive the first dose of vaccine, the same level as in 2022, but still lower than the 86% before the epidemic.
In addition, the United Nations agency noted that only 74% of vaccine recipients have received the necessary second dose, and vaccination coverage must reach 95% to stop the spread of the epidemic.
Ephrem Lemango, UNICEF’s immunization chief, said more than 300,000 measles cases were recorded in 2023, almost three times the previous year.
In the past five years, no fewer than 103 countries have experienced epidemics.
In contrast, 91 countries with high measles vaccination coverage had no outbreaks.
Mr Lemango said more than half of children in ten crisis countries including Sudan, Yemen and Afghanistan were not vaccinated once morest measles.
On the other hand, organizations welcome advances in vaccination once morest papillomaviruses (HPV viruses), particularly the virus that causes cervical cancer.
However, the vaccine still only reaches 56% of adolescent girls in high-income countries and 23% of adolescent girls in low-income countries, well below the 90% target.
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