Inequalities, vaccinations, WHO says: more than four million children in Southeast Asia cannot have life-saving drugs

ROME – L’World Health Organization (WHO) calls for targeted efforts to provide life-saving vaccines to the nearly 4.6 million children in Southeast Asia who remain unvaccinated today. The goal is to strive to reach or exceed pre-pandemic immunization coverage levels.

The drop in vaccines after COVID. The number of unvaccinated children has more than doubled from 2 million in 2019 to 4.6 million in 2021 across the Southeast Asia region, said Poonam Khetrapal Singh, WHO regional director for the region. The first step in being able to guarantee that children can receive at least the most important vaccines is to precisely identify the high-risk areas, i.e. those with the highest number of zero-dose children, and launch intensive immunization campaigns.

An uneven vaccination coverage. Routine vaccination coverage in the region has been highly variable – analyzes Poonam Khetrapal Singh. While many countries have managed to maintain high childhood immunization capacity even during the COVID-19 pandemic and are now aiming to do even more, others slowed down in 2020, then picked up pace again in 2021 and 2022 but without yet reaching pre-pandemic levels. Then there are still other countries, also in Southeast Asia, where coverage continues to be poor.

Some examples. The Republic of East Timor introduced the pneumococcal vaccine, while Nepal became the fourth country globally to license the typhoid vaccine in 2022. Bangladesh has restored immunization services to pre-COVID-19 levels, while India has launched an intensive primary vaccination campaign. Indonesia began an aggressive and early polio vaccination policy two weeks after the start of the polio outbreak in November 2022. Bhutan, North Korea, the Maldives, Sri Lanka and East Timor have continued to vaccinate against measles, until it was completely eradicated, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, while Sri Lanka and the Maldives defeated rubella in 2020. The whole area of ​​South-East Asia has overcome maternal and neonatal tetanus.

The data. With sustained effort over the years, routine immunization coverage in Southeast Asia surpassed 90 percent in 2019. The number of zero-dose children fell from over 5 million in 2010 to 2 million in 2019. However , during the COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of accessing the third vaccine dose against diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus which – as explained by the WHO – is the standard indicator for verifying the level of vaccination coverage of a country, passed from 91 per cent to 85 per cent in 2020 and 82 per cent in 2021, significantly increasing the number of unvaccinated children in one of the areas with the highest birth rate in the world.