Karachi:
Pakistan has become the second largest country with the highest number of children with zero doses of vaccines in South Asia after India, says a media report quoting a new study of the British medical journal Lancet.
The study found that Pakistan had 419,000 children who fell into the zero vaccine category. Pakistan is one of the last two countries in the world together with Afghanistan, where polio still remains endemic despite global efforts to eradicate the virus.
Lancet said in a press release that an important new analysis from the global burden of disease examination vaccine coverage of partners said that despite progress with the last 50 years, the last two decades have also been characterized by stagnant child vaccination rates and wide variation in vaccine coverage.
In 2019, it said, WHO set ambitious goals for improving vaccine coverage globally through the immunization agenda 2030. However, it added that the challenges are worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving millions of children vulnerable to prevent illness and death.
The authors of the study, “Global, regional and national trends in routine vaccination of children from 1980 to 2023 with forecasts to 2030,” said the recent estimates should be taken as a “clear warning” that the 2030 goal would not be reached without “transformation improvements”.
The IA2030 targets included halving the number of ‘zero-dose’ children-destimed as children aged 1 who have not received any dose of diphtheria-tanus-pertussis vaccine. The program also aimed to achieve global coverage of 90% for each of the life course vaccines.
