The United Nations and the United States: The Covid-19 pandemic triggered lockdowns and healthcare delays that resulted in 67 million children missing routine immunizations internationally between 2019 and 2021, according to the United Nations on Wednesday.
“More than a decade of hard-earned gains in routine childhood immunizations has been eroded,” read a new report from the UN’s children’s agency, UNICEF, 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 epidemics.
Vaccine coverage among children fell in 112 nations, and the global percentage of children vaccinated fell 5 points to 81 percent, the lowest level since 2008. Africa and South Asia were impacted very hard.
“Worryingly, the backsliding during the pandemic came at the end of a decade when, in broad terms, growth in childhood immunization had stagnated,” the paper noted.
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 percent to 81 percent between 2019 and 2021, and the number of cases in 2022 doubled compared to 2021.
A drop in vaccination trust
Keeley warned that the decline in vaccination rates could be exacerbated by other crises ranging from climate change to food instability.
“You’ve got an 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 urged nations to “double down on their commitment to increase immunizations financing,” with a focus on increasing “catch-up” vaccination efforts for individuals who missed their shots. The report also expressed concern over a decline in people’s trust in vaccines, which was observed in 52 of the 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.”
The paper noted that vaccine confidence can be “volatile and time specific,” and that “further analysis will be required to determine if the findings are indicative of a longer-term trend” beyond the epidemic.
Overall, it stated that vaccine support “remains relatively strong.”
More than 80% 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 immunization statistics from 2022 indicated promising signals.
However, even restoring numbers to pre-pandemic levels will take years, he warned, not counting the time it will take to find “the children who were missing before the pandemic.”