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Pandemic blockades, disinformation campaigns, conflicts, climate crises and other problems have diverted resources and contributed to the largest decline in the immunization regimen in 30 years.
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This article is from our Daily Covid Briefing
By Stéphanie Nolen
Millions of young people around the world, most of them in the poorest countries, have missed some or all of the vaccines from their formative years over the past two years due to a combination of conflicts, climate emergencies, disinformation campaigns, pandemic lockdowns and covid vaccination efforts that have diverted resources, according to new research from UNICEF, the UN firm that vaccinates some of the world’s young people, and the World Health Organization.
This is the largest decline in the vaccination regimen in 30 years, according to the report. Combined with emerging malnutrition rates, it has created situations that can threaten the lives of millions of young children.
“This is an emergency for the fitness of young people: we want to think about the immediate problems, the number of young people who are going to die from this,” said Unicef Advocacy Officer Lily Caprani. early.
The consistent percentage of international youth who received three doses of the diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine, known as DTP3, which UNICEF uses as a benchmark for vaccination policy, fell in five editions between 2019 and 2021, to 81%. Measles vaccination rates have also fallen to 81 consistent with one hundred, and polio policy has also declined significantly. A vaccination policy rate of 94% is required for herd immunity, to disrupt the chain of transmission of a disease.
This translates into 25 million young people who have not earned the fundamental intervention of deadly diseases.
The number of what UNICEF calls zero-dose youth – those who have not won a single dose of the most critical vaccines – has greatly increased the pandemic, from thirteen million in 2019 to 18 million. This organization includes part of all young people who die before the age of 5.
The firm expected that after a sharp drop in 2020 due to closures, school closures and other COVID-19 reaction measures, childhood vaccination policy would recover in 2021, said Dr Niklas Danielsson, UNICEF’s senior immunization specialist based in Nairobi.
But instead, the challenge was worse. DTP3 and measles policy are at the lowest point since 2008, according to the report.
Dr. Danielsson said the vaccination policy rate in 2021 is in line with that of 2008. “But since then, birth cohorts have increased, which means the number of young people who don’t complete vaccines, or don’t even start, is the highest in the last 30 years,” he said.
He and many others in the immunization picture of the formative years expected a recovery last year as fitness systems learned to adapt to the demands of the pandemic. discourage the vaccination regimen, he said.
At the same time, fitness systems in poorer countries have rushed to carry out limited covid vaccination, diverting criticism to freezers and fitness personnel to put up firearms.
The world made steady progress in the formative years of immunization policy in the 1990s and the first decade of this century. Then rates began to stabilize, as the remaining youth were the most difficult to succeed, such as those in active war zones or nomadic communities. But before the pandemic, there was a redoubled commitment, with the help of organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Gavi, the global vaccine alliance, to try to succeed in the remaining wallet of dosed children. zero. Covid has taken much of that attention and investment.
Over the past two years, India, Nigeria, Indonesia, Ethiopia and the Philippines recorded the number of children who were not vaccinated.
Brazil is also on the list of the 10 most affected countries, a strong replacement for a country that was once known for its higher vaccination policy rates. About 26% of Brazilian babies did not receive any vaccines in 2021, up from 13% in 2018.
“The 30-year task was lost overnight,” said Dr. Brown. Carla Domingues, epidemiologist and former coordinator of Brazil’s national immunization program.
Vaccination has become a politicized issue in Brazil due to the covid pandemic, he said. The federal government, headed by President Jair Bolsonaro, downplayed the importance of the coronavirus even as Brazil had one of the highest death rates in the world and said it would not vaccinate. his own 11-year-old boy opposed the virus.
“For the first time, the federal government does not recommend a vaccine, and this created a climate of total doubt that had never existed in Brazil, where vaccination was fully accepted,” Dr. Domingues said.
At the same time, anti-vaccine teams that had not had much influence in Brazil installed the pandemic in the country, he said, and began to spread incorrect information in Portuguese on social networks.
And all of this happened, Dr. Domingues said, at a time when Brazilians were one generation away from the serious diseases they were asked to vaccinate their young people against, leading them to question the need.
“Parents don’t know the effects of measles or polio, so they start opting for vaccines,” he said. The knowledge that it seems that the acceptance of the pneumonia vaccine is greater than that of polio obviously proves this. “Parents decide not to have polio. They say, ‘It’s been 30 years without polio, so I have to do that?’»
And yet, they have a clear sign of the risk, he said: Earlier this year some cases of measles were detected in São Paulo, six years after Brazil announced the eradication of the disease. a concrete example of what can happen with diphtheria, meningitis and so many other diseases,” he said.
In the Philippines, 43% of babies had not been vaccinated last year. There, part of the challenge lies in Covid’s strict public fitness measures, adding lockdowns. of the day, if they can’t go to school, if the burden of life is passing, moving to a fitness center to vaccinate their child is their priority,” Dr. Danielsson said.
But the Philippines’ scenario is also unclear due to persistent distrust in vaccination after a broad rollout of a dengue vaccine, called Dengvaxia, in 2016, which later turned out to have more severe cases of the disease in some of those who had won it.
“The history of Dengvaxia has compounded doubts about vaccines, especially among school-age children,” said Dr. Anthony Leachon, a public fitness advocate who pleaded with the presidency over the Covid response. “That was the problem. We take care of that. “
UNICEF’s Caprani said it would take a regular amount of resources and commitment to get vaccination grades back to where they were.
“It will not be enough to go back to business as before and repair ordinary vaccination and regimen,” he said. “We are moving to want concerted investments and recovery campaigns, as there is a developing cohort of millions of absolutely unvaccinated young people living in countries that have high degrees of malnutrition and other stresses. “
In Zimbabwe, for example, there has recently been an outbreak of measles in which one in 10 young people hospitalized by this disease dies. countries. )
Dr Fabien Diomande, a polio eradicator with the Global Health Working Group who has worked for years on polio campaigns in West and Central Africa, said reversing the decline in immunization in the formative years would require new agility, innovation and resources.
“It’s like we’re in a new world — those emergencies disappear,” he said. “We will still have covid. We will still have climate crises. We will need to be informed of the works in the context of multiple public fitness emergencies. »
Dr. Domingues in Brazil said covid vaccination efforts can only offer classes on how to catch up. Brazil has achieved a superior vaccination policy by creating ephemeral vaccination stations and manufacturing vaccines for the evening and weekends.
Caprani said that while there is an encouraging resurgence of interest in global fitness cooperation due to Covid, investing in new surveillance measures and other developments threatens to divert attention from the undeniable intervention needed to address the immunization crisis of the formative years: the deployment of thousands of network fitness workers.
“We’re not going to solve this challenge with poster campaigns or social media posts,” he said. build accept as true with: the kind of accepting as true with that means you pay attention to them about vaccines. And there’s rarely enough. “
Jason Gutierrez contributed to the Manila reports.
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