Childhood vaccination rate starts to recover after COVID-19 backslide

Rates of routine childhood vaccines are on the rise worldwide after a historic drop during the Covid-19 pandemic, though the recovery is not evenly spread across the world, with major disparities between larger, middle-income countries and smaller, poorer ones.

A health worker administers a polio vaccine at the Bundung Maternal and Child Health Hospital in Gambia, August 2022. © Edward McAllister/Reuters

Some 20.5 million children missed one or more routine childhood vaccines against deadly diseases like diphtheria or measles in 2022, about four million fewer than in 2021.

However, this is still more than the 18.4 million unvaccinated in 2019, before the Covid pandemic, according to new figures from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called the numbers “encouraging”. There is concern, though,  that the improvement is concentrated in a few, well-resourced countries, such as India and Indonesia, which masks slower recovery elsewhere.

• Unicef says 67 million children missed routine vaccinations because of Covid

Uneven recovery

“We need to find ways of helping every country protect their people, otherwise we run the risk of two tracks emerging, with larger, lower middle income countries outpacing the rest,” the WHO quoted Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

The study is based on estimations from 183 countries, using data based on the use of the three-dose diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTP) vaccine, which serves as a global indicator of immunisation coverage from year to year.

Of the 73 countries that showed substantial drops in routine coverage during the pandemic, 34 have not improved since, or even gotten worse – countries including Angola and Syria.

Measles still a problelm

Measles vaccinations have not rebounded as quickly as others, with 21.9 million children globally missing their first dose in 2022 – 2.7 million more than in 2019 – and 13.3 million their second.

Outbreaks of measles are on the rise, especially in low-income countries where vaccination rates went down in 2022 to 66 percent, compared with 67 percent in 2021.

• Uptake of Measles vaccine declines in France

The only vaccine that has seen uptake return to pre-pandemic levels is HPV, which prevents cervical cancer. However, rates remain well below the 90 percent target, at 67 percent in the high-income countries where it has been introduced, and 55 percent in the low- and middle-income countries.

Repairing health systems

The organisations are urging countries to double down on efforts to get children caught up on vaccinations, to restore disrupted or overstretched health services and developing new policies to vaccinate children born just before or during the pandemic and who are getting too old to be part of routine immunisation efforts.

“Until more countries mend the gaps in routine immunisation coverage, children everywhere will remain at risk of contracting and dying from diseases we can prevent," said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell.

(with newswires)