What's behind the dangerous fall in vaccination rates worldwide?

As false rumours about vaccines in the Covid pandemic have gone mainstream, aid cuts and poverty have contributed to lower take-up of lifesaving jabs. By Fred Harter

- By Fred Harter

Vaccination rates are tumbling across the world, putting millions of children at risk of easily preventable diseases, according to a new landmark study.

So what?

Until recently, low vaccination coverage was seen as an issue affecting poor parts of the world. Now it is impacting rich countries, too. This is owing to a combination of connected factors, including:

• a lack of resources

• Covid-19

• rising vaccine hesitancy

Lofty aims

In 1974 the World Health Organization rolled out an ambitious programme to reach every child with six essential jabs, for polio, measles and other diseases. It was a remarkable success: the lives of roughly 154 million children were saved, mostly from measles, as the global coverage rate for the essential vaccines nearly doubled between 1980 and 2023.

Stalled

Recently, however, progress has slowed. The study, published in the Lancet, shows essential coverage has been in steady decline for a decade. This trend has accelerated sharply since the Covid pandemic. Take measles. The disease is so contagious that 95% of people need to be jabbed to achieve herd immunity. But between 2015 and 2023, the proportion of children receiving the second dose fell from:

• 95% to 85% in Thailand

• 89% to 85% in the UK

• 86% to 79% in Canada

As a result, measles is on the march. Cases rose by 67% between 2015 and 2024.

The Covid effect

The pandemic was brought to heel by the rapid mass rollout of new vaccines, preventing about 450,000 deaths in the UK alone. Yet this came at the cost of reducing public confidence in other jabs, and disrupting their rollout as:

• supply chain turmoil and lockdowns hindered government immunisation programmes, especially in parts of Africa and Asia

• scarce resources were diverted away from routine jabs