2023-07-18 14:15:00
United Nations: Resumption of Vaccination of Children After Its Decline During the Corona Epidemic
The United Nations has announced that the vaccination of children worldwide, which declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, has now resumed. However, the vaccination rates are still below the levels seen before the health crisis.
According to the latest data from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the number of vaccinated children in 2022 has exceeded the figures from 2021 by four million.
“This is good news. On average, countries around the world are starting to recover and are getting closer to the level of immunization they reached before the pandemic,” said Kate O’Brien, WHO’s director of immunization, in a statement to AFP.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also hailed these data as encouraging.
While the increase in the number of vaccinated children is promising, the United Nations warns that the current immunization levels still put children at risk of epidemics.
In 2022, 20.5 million children worldwide did not receive one or more basic vaccines, a decrease from the 24.4 million children in 2021 who missed out on vaccinations.
However, the recovery of immunization rates is not happening at an equal pace among countries, according to O’Brien.
Measles vaccination remains a major concern globally, as measles is one of the most dangerous and contagious pathogens. Although the coverage for the first dose of the measles vaccine increased to 83 percent in 2022 from 81 percent in 2021, it is still lower than the 86 percent achieved in 2019.
On a positive note, the coverage for Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination has exceeded pre-pandemic levels for the first time last year.
Three months ago, the United Nations launched a “broad catch-up” campaign to vaccinate millions of children. The campaign focused on twenty countries where three-quarters of the world’s children who missed out on vaccinations in 2021 reside.
The United Nations continues to emphasize the importance of ensuring high immunization rates among children worldwide to protect them from preventable diseases and potential outbreaks.]
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