A new global study suggests that progress in vaccinating children against a variety of life-threatening diseases has stalled in the past two decades – and even gone backwards in some countries.
The study, published in the medical journal The Lancet, says measles vaccinations have declined in nearly 100 countries.
According to the BBC, the situation has been made worse by the Covid pandemic, leaving millions of children unprotected from diseases such as measles, tuberculosis, and polio.
Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, is quoted as saying: “More children will be hospitalised, permanently damaged and die from fully preventable diseases if the trend is not reversed.”
The global childhood vaccination programme has been a huge success, the BBC reports. Since 1974, more than four billion children have been vaccinated, preventing an estimated 150 million deaths worldwide. In nearly half a century until 2023, researchers say vaccine coverage doubled.
But since 2010 progress has stagnated, to the extent that there are now wide variations in vaccine coverage around the world.
By 2023, there were nearly 16 million children who had not had any childhood vaccinations – most of them in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia.