UN children’s organization says some 67 million children have missed routine immunizations, raising the risk of measles and polio outbreaks.
According to the United Nations Children’s Office, some 67 million children around the world missed all or part of routine vaccinations between 2019 and 2021 due to lockdowns and the disruption of healthcare caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“More than a decade of hard-earned gains in routine childhood immunization have eroded,” UNICEF warned in its annual State of the World’s Children report released Wednesday, warning it would be “challenging” to get back on track.
Of the 67 million children whose vaccinations were “severely disrupted,” 48 million missed routine vaccines completely, the agency said, warning of the possibility of polio and measles outbreaks.
Childhood vaccination rates fell in 112 countries and the percentage of children vaccinated globally fell by 5 percentage points to 81 percent, the lowest since 2008. Africa and South Asia were particularly hard hit.
“Vaccines have played a very important role in helping more children live healthy and long lives,” Brian Keeley, the report’s editor-in-chief, told AFP news agency. “Any drop in vaccination coverage is alarming.”
The fall in vaccination rates could be exacerbated by other crises, Keeley warned, from climate change to food insecurity.
“You have an increasing number of conflicts, economic stagnation in many countries, climate crises and so on,” he said. “This makes it increasingly difficult for health systems and countries to meet vaccination needs.”
UNICEF called on governments “to double their commitment to increase funding for immunization,” with a special focus on speeding up “catch-up vaccinations” for those who missed their vaccinations.
Measles killed about 2.6 million people each year, mostly children, before a vaccine was introduced in 1963. The number of deaths had fallen to 128,000 by 2021, but with vaccine coverage dropping to 81 percent that year, compared to 86 percent in 2019, the number of cases will double by 2022.
‘Warning signal’
The UNICEF report also signaled a decline in confidence in the importance of routine childhood vaccinations.
In 52 of the 55 countries surveyed, public perception of childhood vaccines declined between 2019 and 2021, the UN agency said.
The data was a “worrying warning sign” of increasing vaccine hesitancy amid misinformation, declining trust in governments and political polarization, it said.
“We cannot allow confidence in routine vaccinations to fall victim to the pandemic again,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said in a statement. “Otherwise, the next wave of deaths could be more children with measles, diphtheria or other preventable illnesses.”
In countries such as Papua New Guinea and South Korea, agreement with the statement “vaccines are important for children” fell by 44 percent and by more than a third in Ghana, Senegal and Japan.
In the United States it fell by 13.6 percentage points. In India, China and Mexico, confidence remained broadly unchanged or increased, the report said.
The report stressed that confidence in vaccines can easily shift and the results may not indicate a long-term trend.
Despite the drop in confidence, more than 80 percent of respondents in nearly half of the countries surveyed still said vaccines for children are important.