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Child vaccination rates around the world are stagnating and have still not returned to their pre-Covid-19 pandemic levels, the UN warned on Monday July 15.
“Compared to the level of 2019, before the pandemic, 2.7 million more children were still not vaccinated, or incompletely, in 2023,” said the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) in a joint statement.
“The latest trends show that many countries continue to neglect too many children,” lamented UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell.
“Danger” for “the lives of the most vulnerable children”
In 2023, only 84% of children in the age group who should have received this vaccine, or 108 million, have actually received three doses of the diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTP) vaccine, with the third dose serving as key marker of global vaccination coverage, according to data published by the United Nations health and children’s agencies.
This percentage has not changed since 2022, which means that the modest progress observed that year, after the sharp decline due to the Covid-19 crisis, has “marked time”, underline the UN agencies . This rate was 86% in 2019, before the pandemic.
“We are late,” Kate O’Brien, head of vaccination at the WHO, admitted to the press.
“Global vaccination coverage has not yet fully recovered from the historic decline observed during the pandemic,” she explained.
