There’s no question that immunization is one of the greatest success stories in global health, saving millions of lives every year from vaccine-preventable diseases. Every year more than 116 million, or 86% of all infants born are vaccinated – a number than has been holding firm for a decade.
More than 20 life-threatening diseases can now be prevented by immunization, and new vaccines for major killers like diarrhoea, cervical cancer, cholera and meningitis are quickly being introduced in countries that did not use them previously. While, vaccination has routinely prioritized children in the past, today it is increasingly protecting health among people of all ages.
Commitment to research and development has led to developing new vaccines to protect against malaria, typhoid and Ebola, and many more vaccines are under development for emerging diseases, like COVID-19.
All of this is good news. But it also shows the challenges we’re facing as we try to ensure no one misses out on life-saving vaccines.
Children still missing out on vaccines
Globally, there are still more than 13 million children who never receive any vaccination. These un-vaccinated children, and millions more under-vaccinated children, are found in all countries but the large majority of them live in a small number of countries which are affected by conflict, poverty and fragility.
It’s difficult to reach these children in normal times and intensive work continues to figure out the most effective ways to find them and assure they are receiving immunization and other essential health services. But now COVID-19 is making it even harder.
Immunization services are being scaled back and, in many cases, shut down. Even when the services are still operating parents and caregivers are forgoing taking their children to routine health visits including for immunization out of concern for risk of COVID-19. When vaccination coverage goes down, inevitably more outbreaks will occur, including of life-threatening diseases like measles and polio.
Our challenge now is to ensure we don’t slide backwards on vaccination coverage in the midst of the pandemic, but instead move beyond 86% coverage and reach everyone, everywhere. This will not only protect the health of children and their communities but will protect the health services from a second wave of diseases for which we have vaccines to prevent.
A new vison of immunization
At last year’s Global Vaccine Summit, WHO, the European Commission, governments and partners recognized that to sustain vaccination’s hard-won gains, we need to ensure our health systems are more equitable in their delivery of services.
The new Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) which sets the vision and strategy for 2021-2030, co-created with community organizations, government ministries, partner organizations, academia, vaccine makers, and with non-immunization partners, recognizes universal health coverage (UHC) as essential to immunization success. To improve coverage, IA2030 outlines strategies that are relevant for all countries to break through on stagnation in reaching children not vaccinated and fight against vaccine hesitancy.
It also aims to build stronger surveillance systems for vaccine-preventable diseases, particularly for identifying, tracking, and monitoring disease outbreaks and sustaining research to ensure we are poised to meet the challenges around the corner on outbreaks, antimicrobial resistance, infections for which our vaccines are inadequate; and seize opportunities to tackle diseases for which there are as yet no vaccines.
And, for the first time the new vision expands the global focus for immunization to all age groups, not just children. While this will shift immunization programmes, it will allow us to rethink and strengthen people-centred care to ensure vaccines are taken up by older age groups.
Reaching more people with immunization requires investment
As we set new priorities for 2021 and beyond with the vaccine community, we also need to ensure we have sound investment in immunization. Every year, almost 80 million infants require vaccinations in 68 Gavi-supported countries and this is growing.
Gavi has set an ambitious goal to immunize 300 million more children with 18 vaccines by 2025. In order to reach this goal, it will require US$7.4 billion. Gavi’s replenishment is essential towards reaching the hardest to reach, and ensuring vaccination services are equitable. WHO remains committed to ensuring Gavi’s success.
As we mark World Immunization Week, we must continue to champion the message that #VaccinesWork for All, and not let the COVID-19 pandemic compromise hard won immunization gains in the past decades.
Today’s crisis further highlights the need for new vaccine breakthroughs, like we’ve saw in Ebola, to become the norm. Investments in research and development must be escalated with great intensity to fight new and emerging diseases like COVID-19.
Let’s continue to scale-up, not scale-down our immunization services through primary health care and universal health coverage so that everyone, everywhere has access to life-saving vaccines by 2030. #VaccinesWork for All.