According to the UN war prevented vaccinating 15 million children in the world – UN. This is reported by The Guardian.
Health experts are warning that military conflicts are hampering efforts to vaccinate children around the world, as new figures show that some 14.5 million children have not received a single dose of the vaccine.
According to UNICEF and WHO, more than half of these children live in countries where armed conflicts or other humanitarian crises create unstable and vulnerable conditions.
The war in Sudan has caused a significant increase in the number of unvaccinated children, from about 110,000 in 2021 to about 701,000 in 2023. In Yemen, the number of unvaccinated children has increased from 424,000 to 580,000 in the past three years.
In addition to these 14.5 million unvaccinated children, 6.5 million received incomplete vaccinations, that is, not all the recommended doses.
Both figures are up from 2022, officials said Monday, warning that despite progress in some regions, the international goal of halving the number of children who do not receive a single dose of the vaccine by 2030 is off track.
“This puts the lives of the most vulnerable children at risk,” said Dr Catherine O’Brien, director of WHO’s Department of Immunization and Vaccines.
She added that children in such humanitarian conditions “are also insecure, suffer from malnutrition, lack of medical care and have a higher chance of dying from vaccine-preventable diseases.”
Global vaccination rates have not yet returned to 2019 levels, when the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted immunization programmes. In 2019, 12.8 million children were considered not to have received any dose of the vaccine, and another 5.5 million were partially vaccinated.
Douglas Hageman, UNICEF representative in Sudan, noted that the country’s health care system had collapsed during the war.
“National vaccination coverage has fallen sharply from 85% before the war to around 50% now, with an average of 30% in areas of active conflict,” he said.
Outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, rubella and polio have become commonplace, Hageman added.
Vaccination rates in Yemen were “alarmingly low”, said Peter Hawkins, UNICEF’s country representative: “A combination of factors that have worsened in recent years, including lack of access to health care, reluctance to vaccinate and worsening socioeconomic and political crisis, worsened the situation”.
O’Brien warned that the misinformation spread during the pandemic “continues to affect many countries and actually lead to deaths.”
