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KARACHI:
Pakistan has become the second largest country with the highest number of children with zero doses of vaccines in South Asia after India, a media report said, quoting a new study by British medical journal Lancet.
The study found that Pakistan had 419,000 children falling into that zero-vaccine category. Pakistan is one of the last two countries in the world, alongside Afghanistan, where polio still remains endemic, despite global efforts to eradicate the virus.
The Lancet said in a press release that a major new analysis from the Global Burden of Disease Study Vaccine Coverage Collaborators, said that despite progress of past 50 years, the last two decades have also been marked by stagnating childhood vaccination rates and wide variation in vaccine coverage.
In 2019, it said, the WHO set ambitious goals for improving vaccine coverage globally through the Immunisation Agenda 2030. However, it added, the challenges exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving millions of children vulnerable to preventable diseases and death.
The authors of the study, “Global, regional, and national trends in routine childhood vaccination coverage from 1980 to 2023 with forecasts to 2030”, said that the latest estimates should be taken as a “clear warning” that 2030 target would not be achieved without “transformational improvements”.
The IA2030 goals included halving the number of ‘zero-dose’ children — estimated as children aged under 1 who have not received any dose of the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine. The programme also aimed to achieve global coverage of 90% for each of the life-course vaccines.
