In the Corona year 2020, significantly more children missed their routine vaccinations than in the previous year. As the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reported on Thursday, the number rose again by 3.7 million to 23 million children who were not vaccinated against diseases such as measles or polio last year. The hardest hit were Southeast Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean. However, in almost all regions of the world in 2020, children were unable to receive vital vaccine doses.
The main reason was limited access to health services and vaccination programs, WHO and UNICEF said.
Compared to the previous year, 3.5 million more children would not have received the first dose of the vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough (DTP-1) and three million more not against measles in 2020.
The number of children who did not receive their first DTP-1 dose rose sharply in eleven countries - in some cases it even doubled: in India, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mexico, Mozambique, Angola, Tanzania, Argentina, Venezuela and Mali.
Interruptions to vaccination programs
Even before the Covid 19 pandemic, the global vaccination rate against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, measles and polio had stagnated at around 86 percent. This was well below the 95 percent recommended by the WHO for protection against measles; this is often the first disease to break out again if children are not reached with vaccines. During the pandemic, there were also interruptions in vaccination programs, for example because medical staff were used to fight Covid-19 or girls could not be vaccinated against human papillomavirus (HPV) due to school closings, which is supposed to protect them from cervical cancer.
"The Covid-19 pandemic and the related disruptions have caused us to lose ground," said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF Executive Director. The consequences would now have to be borne by those “with their lives and their well-being” who are already the most vulnerable anyway. At the same time, however, Fore also pointed out that there had been alarming signs even before Corona that the global community was falling behind in immunizing children against preventable childhood diseases. That would have been shown by the widespread measles outbreaks two years ago. "Now that we have the fair distribution of Covid-19 vaccines in mind, we must remember that vaccine distribution has always been unfair, but it doesn't have to be."