Nearly 10 million children in lower-income countries like Nigeria and Pakistan have never been vaccinated, leaving them vulnerable to deadly diseases like polio, measles, and pneumonia. Two-thirds of these “zero-dose” kids live below the international poverty line, their families subsisting on less than $2.35 a day in poor villages, in urban slums, in conflict zones.
Over the last 20 years, international organizations spearheaded by GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance – in partnership with national governments, the World Health Organization, and UNICEF – have ensured that significantly more children in poor countries in Africa and elsewhere get routine vaccinations: 81 percent today versus 59 percent in 2000.
And that has had a major impact – a 70 percent drop in child mortality from vaccine-preventable diseases over two decades. As an anchor donor to the Gavi Alliance, Canada has played a major part in this success.
But what about the root causes of non-vaccination of the young: is the problem one of poverty alone, of the failure of domestic governments and their public-health departments to reach the most vulnerable communities, or simply of an inability to overcome deep-rooted social disadvantages? A new Canada-India study of tens of thousands of zero-dose children in India suggests that the causes of low-vaccination rates in lower-income countries is all of those and more.
Published today (November 15, 2021) in the Lancet Global Health and led by Université de Montréal...
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