In news– UNICEF India has recently released the agency’s global flagship report “The State of the World’s Children 2023: For Every Child, Vaccination,” highlighting the significance of childhood immunisation.
Key highlights-
- Based on new data collected by The Vaccine Confidence Project (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) and published by UNICEF, the report reveals that popular perception of the importance of vaccines for children held firm or improved only in China, India and Mexico out of 55 countries studied.
- While the vaccine confidence marks a decline in over a third of the studied countries, e.g., in the Republic of Korea, Papua New Guinea, Ghana, Senegal and Japan after the start of the pandemic.
- The report warns of the growing threat of vaccine hesitancy due to factors such as access to misleading information and declining trust in vaccine efficacy.
- The decline in vaccine confidence globally comes amid the largest sustained backslide in childhood immunization in 30 years, fuelled by the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The report has also mentioned that a total of 67 million children missed out on vaccinations between 2019 and 2021. In South Asia, this figure is 13.9 million children.
- New data produced for the report by the International Center for Equity in Health found that in the poorest households, 1 in 5 children are zero-dose while in the wealthiest, it is just 1 in 20.
- It found unvaccinated children often live in hard-to-reach communities such as rural areas or urban slums. They often have mothers who have not been able to go to school and who are given little say in family decisions.
- These challenges are greatest in low- and middle-income countries, where about 1 in 10 children in urban areas are zero dose and 1 in 6 in rural areas.
- In upper-middle-income countries, there is almost no gap between urban and rural children.
Source: Hindustan Times
