Childhood vaccination is stagnating worldwide, even in wealthy countries.

BarcelonaVaccine success stories have given way to a decline or, at best, stagnation among the child population. The turning point may have been around 2010, when a combination of factors caused the number of unimmunized children against preventable diseases such as diphtheria, whooping cough, polio, and measles to skyrocket, especially in developing countries, although the West is also not immune to this dangerous trend.

A study published in the journal The Lancet confirms that, as a result of the COVID pandemic, in 2023, 15.7 million children worldwide had not received a single dose of the diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccine in their first year of life. More than half of this group live in eight countries: Nigeria, India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Indonesia, and Brazil.

The report warns that in the decade between 2010 and 2019, for example, measles vaccination decreased in 100 out of 204 countries. In this case, the main decrease observed was in Latin America and the Caribbean, where coverage fell from around 90% in 2010 to 87% in 2019, resulting in almost one million fewer children vaccinated against measles in the latter year. In addition, 21 of 36 high-income countries (including Spain) experienced declines in coverage of at least one dose against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, measles, polio, and tuberculosis.

The COVID-19 crisis further exacerbated the problems, the study adds, warning that the global immunization targets for 2030 will not be met if authorities do not implement "targeted and equitable" strategies, and that primary care is emphasized over primary care. "The pandemic, which in many areas led to a decrease in trust in public health institutions and polarized opinions about the need for and safety of COVID vaccination, has had several effects on public perceptions of the importance of routine childhood vaccination and the willingness to vaccinate," the authors state.

Vaccination denial groups are gaining ground and are even reaching governments, as is the case with the United States administration, which has placed anti-vaccine Robert F. Kennedy at the head of health policies. His debut in office was by dismissing members of the expert committee on the cow. "Despite monumental efforts over the past fifty years, progress is far from universal. A large number of children remain unvaccinated or not vaccinated enough," notes the study's lead author, Jonathan Mosser of the University of Washington.

Over the past five decades, vaccination rates have doubled worldwide, to the point that the number of children who had never received a routine childhood vaccine (called zero-dose children) has fallen by 75%, from 58.8 million to 1.1%. More than 4 billion children have been immunized, and the doses are estimated to have prevented the deaths of an estimated 154 million children.

But in recent years, vaccine hesitancy has led to the return of outbreaks of preventable diseases, increasing "an ever-increasing global risk," the experts summarize in the journal article. They refer to cases of polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and there is also an outbreak in Papua New Guinea, where less than half the population is immunized.

But the decline in vaccinations also affects high-income countries, such as those in the European Union and the United States, where measles cases have increased in recent years.