The United Nations claimed on Wednesday that around 67 million children around the world had partially or fully missed routine vaccines between the year 2019 and 2021 because of lockdowns and health care disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, reported AFP.
“More than a decade of hard-earned gains in routine childhood immunization have been eroded,” according to a recent UNICEF report, adding that getting back on track “will be challenging.”
UNICEF noted that of the 67 million children whose vaccinations were “severely disrupted,” 48 million did not receive routine vaccines at all, raising fears about potential polio and measles outbreaks.
Vaccine coverage among children fell in 112 nations, and the global percentage of children vaccinated fell 5 points to 81 per cent, the lowest level since 2008. Africa and South Asia were impacted very hard.
The report claimed, according to AFP, “Worryingly, the backsliding during the pandemic came at the end of a decade when, in broad terms, growth in childhood immunization had stagnated.”
Vaccines save 4.4 million lives per year, a figure that the UN estimates may rise to 5.8 million by 2030 if its ambitious goals of leaving “no one behind” are reached.
“Vaccines have played a really important role in allowing more children to live healthy, long lives,” Brian Keeley, the report’s editor in chief, told AFP. “Any decline at all in vaccination rates is worrying.”
Measles killed around 2.6 million people each year prior to the advent of a vaccine in 1963, the majority of them were children. By 2021, that figure had dropped to 128,000.
However, the percentage of children vaccinated against measles declined from 86 per cent to 81 per cent between 2019 and 2021, and the number of cases in 2022 doubled compared to 2021.
The slide in vaccination rates could be compounded by other crises, Keeley warned, from climate change to food insecurity.
“You’ve got increasing number of conflicts, economic stagnation in a lot of countries, climate emergencies, and so on,” he said. “This all sort of makes it harder and harder for health systems and countries to meet vaccination needs.”
UNICEF called on governments “to double-down on their commitment to increase financing for immunization” with special attention on accelerating “catch-up” vaccination efforts for those who missed their shots.
The report also raised concerns about a drop in people’s confidence in vaccines, seen in 52 out of 55 countries surveyed.
“We cannot allow confidence in routine immunizations to become another victim of the pandemic,” Catherine Russell, UNICEF’s executive director, said in a statement. “Otherwise, the next wave of deaths could be of more children with measles, diphtheria or other preventable diseases.”
Vaccine confidence can be “volatile and time specific,” the report said, noting that “further analysis will be required to determine if the findings are indicative of a longer-term trend” beyond the pandemic.
Overall, it said that support for vaccines “remains relatively strong.”
More than 80 per cent of respondents in around half of the 55 nations polled “perceived vaccines as important for children.”
“There is reason to be somewhat hopeful that services are recovering in quite a few countries,” Keeley said, adding that preliminary immunisation statistics from 2022 indicated promising signals.
However, even returning to pre-pandemic levels will take years, he warned, not to mention reaching “the children who were missing before the pandemic.”
BDST: 1105 HRS, APRIL 20, 2023
MSK
