The World Health Organization and UNICEF said their figures show 25 million children last year failed to get vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, a marker for childhood immunization coverage.
Millions of COVID vaccines doses have been wasted in the United States according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Scientists said low vaccine coverage rates had already resulted in preventable outbreaks of diseases like measles and polio. In March 2020, WHO and partners asked countries to suspend their polio eradication efforts amid the accelerating COVID-19 pandemic. There have since been dozens of polio epidemics in more than 30 countries.
“This is particularly tragic as tremendous progress was made in the two decades before the COVID pandemic to improve childhood vaccination rates globally,” said Helen Bedford, a professor of children's health at University College London, who was not connected to the U.N. report. She said the news was shocking but not surprising, noting that immunization services are frequently an “early casualty” of major social or economic disasters.
Dr. David Elliman, a consultant pediatrician at Britain's Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, said it was critical to reverse the declining vaccination trend among children. “The effects of what happens in one part of the world can ripple out to affect the whole globe,” he said in a statement, noting the rapid spread of COVID-19 and more recently, monkeypox. “Whether we act on the basis of ethics or ‘enlightened self interest’, we must put top of our list of priorities.”
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