The future health of children may be at risk as global confidence in kids’ vaccines is dwindling amid a major backslide in vaccine uptake during the COVID-19 pandemic.
That’s according to a new report out by the United Nations' children’s humanitarian aid group UNICEF, which found that the threat of vaccine hesitancy “may be growing” because of uncertainty about the response to the pandemic as well as “growing access to misleading information, declining trust in expertise, and political polarisation.”
That report, "The State of the World’s Children 2023: For Every Child, Vaccination" shows that China, India and Mexico were the only countries studied where the importance of vaccines either held firm or even improved.
In most countries, however, UNICEF reports that people under 35 and women were more likely to report less confidence about vaccines for children since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
This also comes as uptake for childhood vaccines across the world saw a decline during the pandemic, with 67 million children missing out on vaccinations between 2019 and 2021 and vaccination coverage levels decreasing in 112 countries.
Declining confidence and lower vaccination rates are a real concern for UNICEF. “At the height of the pandemic, scientists rapidly developed vaccines that saved countless lives. But despite this historic achievement, fear and disinformation about all types of vaccines circulated as widely as the virus itself,” said Catherine Russell, UNICEF executive director, in a release.
“[These] data [are] a worrying warning signal. We cannot allow confidence in routine immunizations to become another victim of the pandemic. Otherwise, the next wave of deaths could be of more children with measles, diphtheria or other preventable diseases.”
UNICEF is now calling on governments to “double-down on their commitment” to boost immunization funds while also working harder to unlock available resource in poorer countries to help boost the post-COVID catch-up vaccination efforts.