A health worker administers a polio vaccine to a child in Karachi, Pakistan. Vaccine coverage rates among children started to fall after the COVID-19 pandemic.Fareed Khan/The Associated Press
Efforts to vaccinate children globally have stalled since 2010, leaving millions vulnerable to tetanus, polio, tuberculosis and other diseases that can be easily prevented.
Protection from measles in particular dropped in 100 countries between 2010 and 2019, unravelling decades of progress, including in rich countries that had previously eliminated the highly infectious disease, according to a new analysis of global vaccination trends published Tuesday in the journal Lancet.
“After clean water, vaccination is the most effective intervention for protecting the health of our children,” said Helen Bedford, a professor of children’s health at University College London, who was not connected to the research. She warned there has been a small but worrying rise in the number of parents skipping vaccination for their children in recent years, for reasons including misinformation.
In Britain, Bedford said that has resulted in the largest number of measles recorded since the 1990s and the deaths of nearly a dozen babies from whooping cough. Vaccination rates in the U.S. are also falling, and exemptions from vaccinations are at an all-time high.
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After the World Health Organization established its routine immunization program in 1974, countries made significant efforts to protect children against preventable and sometimes fatal diseases; the program is credited with inoculating more than 4 billion children, saving the lives of 154 million worldwide.
Since the program began, the global coverage of children receiving three doses of the diphtheria-tetanus-whooping cough vaccine nearly doubled, from 40% to 81%. The percentage of kids getting the measles vaccine also jumped from 37% to 83%, with similar increases for polio and tuberculosis.
But after the COVID-19 pandemic, coverage rates dropped, with an estimated 15.6 million children missing out on the diphtheria-tetanus-whooping cough vaccine and the measles vaccine. Nearly 16 million children failed to get vaccinated against polio and 9 million missed out on the TB vaccine, with the biggest impact in sub-Saharan Africa. The study was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance.
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Researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, who conducted the analysis, noted that more than half of the world’s 15.7 million unvaccinated children live in just eight countries in 2023: Nigeria, India, Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Indonesia and Brazil.
Since U.S. President Donald Trump has begun to withdraw the U.S. from the WHO and dismantled the U.S Agency for International Aid, public health experts have warned of new epidemics of infectious diseases. The researchers said it was too early to know what impact recent funding cuts might have on children’s immunization rates.
The WHO said there had been an 11-fold spike in measles in the Americas this year compared to 2024. Measles infections doubled in the European region in 2024 versus the previous year and the disease remains common in Africa and Southeast Asia.
“It is in everyone’s interest that this situation is rectified,” said Dr. David Elliman, a pediatrician who has advised the British government, in a statement. “While vaccine-preventable infectious diseases occur anywhere in the world, we are all at risk.”
