Mexico is one of the 10 countries with the greatest deficiencies in childhood vaccination in 2020: 454 thousand children were not immunized with the first dose against diphtheria, tetanus and whoops, according to a joint report by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Unicef.
According to the report, worldwide 23 million children were left without basic vaccines through routine immunization services in 2020. It’s the highest number since 2009 and means an increase of 3.7 million children over 2019.
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The pandemic forced to divert resources and personnel towards the fight against COVID, and many medical services had to close or reduce their schedules, under this context, Mexico is in the fifth place of countries with the highest increase in children who did not receive a first dose of vaccination, going from 348 thousand in 2019 to 454 thousand last year.
The UN on Thursday warned of the risk of an “absolute catastrophe” if the dangerous backlog in vaccinating children in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic is not addressed and health restrictions are lifted too quickly.
“In 2021, we have the potential for an absolute catastrophe,” said Dr Kate O’Brien, director of WHO’s vaccination department in Geneva.
The situation of unprotected children and the too rapid lifting of health restrictions against COVID – who cared in part against some childhood diseases – are already making their effects felt, for example with measles outbreaks in Pakistan, the WHO official stressed.
These two factors combined are “the absolute catastrophe against which we sound the alarm now because we need to act immediately to protect those children,” he insisted.
Alarm signal
For both Unifec and who, the most serious thing is that 17 million children – mostly living in conflict zones, isolated places or very disadvantaged neighbourhoods deprived of health infrastructure – certainly did not have any doses in the past year.
These figures “are a clear warning sign, the COVID-19 pandemic and the disruptions it has caused have caused us to lose precious ground that we cannot afford to give up and the consequences will be in deaths and in loss of quality of life of the most vulnerable, “said the director of Unicef, Henrietta Fore.
The vaccination rate for diphtheria, tetanus and convulsive cough was stagnant at 86% for several years before the pandemic and in 2020 fell to 83%.
In the case of measles, a highly contagious disease that needs a 95% vaccination coverage rate to be controlled, only 71% of children received the second dose.
In the Americas, there is a “worrying long-term trend” despite the fact that the decline linked to the pandemic was modest (2 percentage points less than in 2019).
“Misinformation about vaccines, instability and other factors form a worrying picture” in the region where “the vaccination rate continues to fall,” say WHO and Unicef.
Only 82% of children are fully immunized with the diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine, compared to 91% in 2016.
In Asia, the coverage rate fell from 91% to 85% in 2020 in India, which had the number of children half-vaccinated or unin vaccinated last year at 3.5 million. Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines also saw an increase in the number of unprotected children.
The UN stresses that it is important that the distribution of anti-covid vaccines is not to the detriment of childhood vaccination programmes.
With information from AFP
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