Venezuela has 67% coverage for diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough

The percentage of children vaccinated once morest diseases such as measles, tetanus and diphtheria has stagnated in 2023 and there are still tens of millions of them without receiving this immunization, the United Nations (UN) warned on Monday, noting that coverage remains below what existed before the pandemic. In the case of Venezuela, the country has 67% coverage for diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough.

The health crisis that affected the world due to Covid paralyzed vaccination programs in many national health networks, especially in developing countries, and although initiatives have been undertaken to recover what was lost, they have not yet been entirely successful, according to figures shown by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Thus, the percentage of children who received at least one of the two doses required for the measles vaccine last year was 83%, the same as in 2022, when in 2019, the year before the pandemic, it was 86%, explained UNICEF’s global director of immunization, Ephrem Lemango, at a press conference.

The number of children worldwide who have not received a single dose of the measles vaccine has also risen to 22.1 million, compared with 19.3 million five years ago.

Positive data

On a positive note, the percentage of children who have received the full course was higher last year (74%) than in 2022 (73%) and 2019 (71%).

Countries with the lowest measles vaccination coverage are often conflict-affected or vulnerable places, although in first place is a European nation, Montenegro, with a rate of just 24%, followed by North Korea (28%), the Central African Republic (41%) and Yemen (45%).

“Three out of four children live in areas with a high risk of measles outbreaks,” said Lemango, who noted that last year 300,000 cases of the disease were confirmed worldwide, almost three times as many as the previous year.

Similarly, the percentage of children who received the three required doses of the DTP vaccine once morest diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis was 84% ​​last year, the same percentage as in 2022 but two percentage points lower than in 2019.

89% received at least one or two doses of this vaccine, once more a rate identical to that of the previous year and lower than the pre-pandemic rate of 90%.

By 2023, 14.5 million children had not received a single dose of this basic vaccine for the prevention of these diseases, compared to 12.8 million in 2019.

Vaccination baja

In this case, the countries with the lowest vaccination rates are North Korea (41%), Papua New Guinea (45%) and Somalia (52%), while Venezuela is in eighth position from the bottom with a coverage of only 67%.

“Global immunization coverage has still not recovered from the historic setback it suffered during the pandemic,” said Katherine O’Brien, director of vaccination programs at the WHO.

WHO, UNICEF and the GAVI Vaccine Alliance, which collaborates with both on immunization in developing countries, have launched the “Big Catch-Up” strategy to recover pre-2020 figures, and according to Lemango, this has been achieved in 25 of the 35 countries where this strategy has been applied.

On the positive side, WHO and UNICEF highlighted the great progress in vaccination once morest the human papillomavirus (HPV), which in the long term can cause cervical cancer in women.

Global coverage

Global coverage in 2023 was 27%, seven points higher than in 2022 and 10 points higher than in 2019, benefiting mainly from the introduction of single-dose vaccines as opposed to traditional ones that required two inoculations.

This improvement, O’Brien said, was also partly due to the HPV vaccine rollout campaign in countries with large populations such as Bangladesh, Indonesia and Nigeria, with the support of GAVI.

The WHO and UNICEF officials recalled that vaccines have saved an estimated 154 million lives over the past half century, with vaccines once morest measles accounting for approximately 60% of the lives saved.

Geneva / EFE