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Unicef
A boy was vaccinated against measles in Samoa last year; many of these programs this year have been disrupted by the pandemic
The pandemic has caused a sharp drop in the number of children vaccinated worldwide, says the UN.
The decline in immunization against diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough in the first four months of the year is the first in nearly three decades.
Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, director of the World Health Organization, said that vaccines were an enormously powerful public health tool.
He said the suffering and death caused by children who miss vaccines could overshadow that caused by the virus.
Immunization programs in three-quarters of the more than 80 countries that responded to a UN survey have been discontinued, UNICEF and the WHO said.
They said the disruptions were related to a lack of personal protective equipment for health workers, travel restrictions, low levels of health worker staff and a reluctance to leave home, all of which saw the programs restricted or closed.
As of May this year, at least 30 measles vaccination campaigns had been canceled or were at risk.
Measles outbreaks were already on the rise before the pandemic occurred, with 10 million people infected in 2018 and 140,000 deaths, most of whom were children, according to UN data.
UNICEF chief Henriette Fore said the coronavirus had made routine vaccinations a “daunting challenge.”
“We must prevent further deterioration in vaccine coverage … before children’s lives are threatened by other diseases,” he said, adding: “We cannot change one health crisis for another.”
This will inevitably cost lives
By Richard Warry, assistant editor for health, BBC News
Disruption of the global immunization program is extremely bad news, especially for the world’s poorest countries. Vaccines are estimated to save up to 3 million lives a year by protecting children from serious illness.
The UNICEF program is specifically targeted at children who would otherwise have difficulty receiving good quality health care, but although vaccines now protect more children than ever, millions of children remain unprotected, and it is estimated that more than 1.5 million people each. year of diseases that vaccines could prevent.
Experts believe that low immunization rates among poor and marginalized children seriously jeopardize all of the progress made in other areas of maternal and child health, so a major disruption to the scale outlined in this new report will inevitably cost many lives.
The coronavirus has consumed large amounts of health resources worldwide, as the international community has focused on efforts to combat the deadly impact of the virus.
It has also hampered the delivery of health care, particularly in poorer countries where supply chains have been disrupted, protective equipment and facilities may be basic, and fear of infection has caused people to miss clinics. .
But diseases such as measles, diphtheria and cholera are already on the rise, underscoring the urgency of finding ways to tackle this problem.
Progress in immunization had already stalled before the pandemic, UN agencies said.
In 2019, almost 14 million children, more than half of them in Africa, did not receive life-saving vaccines against diseases such as measles and diphtheria.
Two-thirds of them were in 10 countries: Angola, Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Philippines.
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Meanwhile, historically high immunization rates had decreased in Latin America and the Caribbean, the UN said, and immunization coverage decreased at least 14 percentage points in Brazil, Bolivia, Haiti and Venezuela over the past decade.
“The probability that a child born today will be fully vaccinated with all the recommended vaccines globally by the time he turns five is less than 20 percent,” said UNICEF and WHO.
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