Children’s vaccination for potentially deadly diseases is slowed worldwide due to persistent economic inequalities, problems caused by the Covid pandemic, and vaccine misinformation, endangering millions of lives, warning a report published today.

The global overview of child vaccination from 1980 to 2023, published in The Lancet, provides updated estimates of 204 countries and territories, in view of a Gavi Alliance (GAVI) donor conference (GAVI) to be held in Brussels today.

In the last fifty years, unprecedented progress has been made and the basic immunization program of the World Health Organization (which) has saved about 154 million lives of children. For example, vaccine coverage against diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, polio and tuberculosis have doubled worldwide between 1980 and 2023, researchers said.

But “this progress hides recent challenges and remarkable inequalities,” the scientific journal notes.

The EU recorded almost ten times the measles cases in 2024 compared to 2023 and the US exceeded 1,000 confirmed cases last monthalready much more than the entire 2024.

A increasing number – A disease that has long been eliminated in many parts of the world thanks to vaccination- refers to Pakistan and Afghanistan, while affecting Papua New Guinea.

All of this threaten to prevent the world’s 2030 immunization targets, including the provision of the necessary vaccines to 90% of children and adolescents.

Which is also aimed at reducing half of the number of children below one year who have not received a single dose of the vaccine of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis compared to 2019.

Only 18 countries have achieved this so far, according to the report, funded by the Gates Foundation and Gavi.

The worrying elements and reasons for reducing vaccinations

Vaccination against measles decreased between 2010 and 2019 in almost half of countries, mainly in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the percentage of children who received at least one dose of vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, polio or polio.

Then the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, exacerbating the difficulties.

Indicative of the impact of the pandemic: From 2020 to 2023 nearly additional 13 million children did not receive a single dose vaccine and about 15.6 million children did not receive the three full doses of the vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis or vaccine against measles.

And the huge inequalities remain, in particular at the expense of poorer countries. In 2023 more than half of the 15.7 million unemployed children in the world lived in just eight countries, mainly in sub -Saharan Africa and South Asia.

“Regular childhood vaccination is one of the most powerful and cost -effective public health interventions,” said Jonathan Moser, a key author of the study and a member of the US Institute of Measurement and Evaluation of Health (IHME). “However, the persistent global inequalities, the challenges raised by the Covid pandemic and the growing misinformation and the reluctance towards the vaccines have contributed to the weakening of progress in vaccination,” he said in a statement.

To these factors are added ‘one Increasingly displaced number of displaced and the growing Inequalities due to armed conflict, political instability, economic uncertainty and climate crises“, Pointed out Emily Hauser, another research author and researcher at IHME.

As a result, outbreaks of vaccination diseases are increasing worldwide, endangering lives and exposing the affected countries at increasing costs to deal with them.