Global vaccination efforts stall, leaving millions vulnerable to preventable diseases
London – Efforts to vaccinate children on a global scale have stalled since 2010, leaving millions of vulnerable people to tetanus, polio, tuberculosis and other diseases that can be easily prevented.
Protection against measles in particular fell in 100 countries between 2010 and 2019, decades of decades of progress, including in rich countries which had previously eliminated highly infectious disease, according to a new analysis of world vaccination trends published Tuesday in the journal Lancet.
“After drinking water, vaccination is the most effective intervention to protect the health of our children,” said Helen Bedford, children’s health teacher at the University College in London, who was not linked to research. She warned that there has been a low increase but disturbing in the number of parents jumping for vaccination for their children in recent years, for reasons such as disinformation.
In Great Britain, Bedford said that this has resulted in the greatest number of measles recorded since the 1990s and on the death of almost a dozen painful babies. In the United States, vaccination rates are also down and vaccinations are at a record level.
After the World Health Organization established its routine vaccination program in 1974, countries made significant efforts to protect children from avoidable and sometimes fatal diseases; The program is recognized for having inoculated more than 4 billion children, which saves the life of 154 million worldwide.
Since the start of the program, global coverage of children receiving three doses of the Diphterian-Tetanus cough vaccine has almost doubled, from 40% to 81%. The percentage of children obtaining the measles vaccine also increased from 37% to 83%, with similar increases for polio and tuberculosis.
But after the COVVI-19 pandemic, the coverage rates dropped, with around 15.6 million children missing the cough vaccine and the measles vaccine. Nearly 16 million children were not vaccinated against polio and 9 million missed the vaccine against tuberculosis, with the greatest impact in sub -Saharan Africa. The study was funded by the bill & Melinda Gates and Gavi Foundation, The Vaccine Alliance.
Researchers from the Institute for metrics and health assessment at Washington University, who have carried out the analysis, noted that more than half of the 15.7 million unvaccinated children in the world live in only eight countries in 2023: Nigeria, India, Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Indonesia and Brazil.
Since President Trump began to withdraw the United States from the WHO and dismantled the American agency for international aid, public health experts warned against new epidemics of infectious diseases. Researchers said it was too early to find out what impact could have recent financing reductions in children’s immunization rates.
The WHO said there had been a peak of 11 times in measles in the Americas this year compared to 2024. Beanny infections doubled in the European region in 2024 compared to the previous year and that the disease remains common in Africa and South East Asia.
“It is in everyone’s interest that this situation is rectified,” said David Elliman, a pediatrician who advised the British government in a statement. “While preventive infectious diseases for vaccination occur around the world, we are all threatened.”
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