A three-year effort to immunise children who missed routine vaccinations due to the Covid-19 crisis is on course to reach the 21 million target, the United Nations has said.
The UN’s World Health Organization and children’s agency Unicef, along with the Gavi Vaccine Alliance, had launched “The Big Catch-Up” during the World Immunisation Week in 2023 as a response to the 2020 pandemic, which disrupted vaccination campaigns.
The initiative, focused on children aged 1 to 5 years and spanning 36 countries in Africa and Asia, ended in March this year.
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About 12.3 million children who were previously “zero-dose” and had never received a vaccine were immunised against diseases such as diphtheria and polio, the agencies said. Before the drive, around 15 million children had not received a measles shot.
While final data is still being compiled, the global initiative is “on track to meet its target of catching up 21 million children” who are either unvaccinated or under-immunised, the agencies said in a joint statement Friday.
Besides reaching those children, the agencies said the drive had also improved immunisation programmes, making them better equipped to identify older children who were not on the system, having missed earlier doses.
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Anti-vaccine content
The push comes at a time when some traditional backers such as the US are scaling back aid even as millions of infants still miss routine immunisation every year, leaving them vulnerable to preventable diseases such as measles, diphtheria and polio.
Ephrem Lemango, Chief of Immunisation at Unicef, said recent sharp funding cuts to global health have “seriously affected delivery of immunisation services” and could “likely reverse hard earned progress”.
The statement said chronic gaps in routine immunisation were “plain to see”, with measles outbreaks rising in every region. Around 11 million cases were registered in 2024.
Last year, US Health Secretary and long-time vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cut financial support for Gavi, a group that helps buy vaccines for the world’s poorest countries.
He claimed the group ignores safety issues with the immunisations it provides.
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Gavi chief executive Sania Nishtar said: “We are up against a social media engine which has an incentive to promote disinformation, and I think that needs to be strategically tackled.
“The social media algorithms promote hate, disinformation and lies. Put a good piece of information out there and you will have no traction,” she said.
(with newswires)
