The COVID-19 Pandemic Has Erased Decades of Progress on Childhood Vaccination

While the world waits for a COVID-19 vaccine, children across the globe are going without shots already known to be life-saving. With the world in disarray due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of children vaccinated this year against infections like diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles and pneumococcal disease has fallen to levels not seen since the 1990s, according to a new report from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “In other words,” the report reads, “we’ve been set back about 25 years in about 25 weeks.” That stark figure comes from the Gates Foundation’s annual Goalkeepers report, which evaluates global progress on the United Nations’ sustainable development goals, a set of global health, equity and sustainability benchmarks the group hopes to hit by 2030. Progress on nearly all of the goals has stalled or reversed this year as the world struggles to contain the pandemic. Rates of poverty, malnutrition and childhood mortality are going up for the first time in years. A continued drop in global smoking rates is some of the only good news in the report. But the significant decrease in childhood vaccinations is among the most dramatic of the report’s findings. International survey data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation shows that scores of children around the world missed vaccination appointments this spring, compared to last. Last year, 84% of the world’s children received all the vacci...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news