Conflicts are obstructing global efforts to vaccinate children worldwide, health leaders warn

Conflicts have obstructed global efforts to vaccinate children across the world against severe diseases, health leaders have warned.

According to data from the United Nations’ children’s agency, UNICEF, and the World Health Organisation (WHO), on Monday, around 14.5 million children did not receive a single immunisation dose in 2023 while 6.5 million children were “under-vaccinated”.

The figures mark a rise from 2022 and an especially significant spike from 2019 when the number of “zero-dose” children amounted to 12.8 million and the under-vaccinated numbered 5.5 million.

Over half of those children reportedly live in 10 developing countries including Nigeria, India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia, with Sudan, Yemen and Afghanistan joining the list in 2023.

Out of those countries, however, the conflict zones posed the greatest factor to the hampering of the efforts to vaccinate children worldwide, with Yemen having 580,000 unvaccinated children compared to 424,000 three years ago.

READ: Thousands of doses of childhood vaccines enter Gaza: Palestinian health ministry

Sudan has notably seen the most significant rise in unvaccinated children, numbering around 701,000 last year compared to around 110,000 in 2021.

According to Douglas Hageman, UNICEF’s Sudan representative, the ongoing one-year-long war has ravaged the country’s health system and caused it to collapse. “National vaccination coverage has plummeted from 85 per cent before the war to around 50 per cent currently, with rates averaging 30 per cent in active conflict areas and as low as 8 per cent in South Darfur,” Hageman stated.

The crisis has reportedly resulted in common outbreaks of serious diseases such as measles, rubella and polio were common, all of which are preventable with vaccines.

Dr Katherine O’Brien, the director of the WHO’s immunisation and vaccines department, stressed that the situation “puts the lives of the most vulnerable children at risk”, and that children undergoing such humanitarian crises “also lack security, they lack nutrition, they lack healthcare and are most likely as a result of those things to die from a vaccine-preventable disease if they get it.”