The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) acknowledged that this decline is part of a global trend, which has taken the region over the last 10 years from one of the highest child immunization rates in the world to one of the lowest.
During the presentation of the report, The State of the World’s Children 2023: For Every Child, Immunization, the agency warned that 67 million children worldwide did not receive one or more vaccines in three years due to the interruption of health services caused by tensions in health systems.
It also pointed to the diversion of scarce resources, conflicts and the decline in people’s confidence in immunization as causes of this deterioration.
In Latin America, coverage of the third dose of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine, also known as DTP3, among children under one year of age fell 18 percentage points, from 93 percent in 2012 to 75 percent in 2021.
“This is the lowest vaccination rate in the region in nearly 30 years, placing Latin America and the Caribbean below the global average (81 percent) and just ahead of Eastern and Southern Africa (74 percent),” the UN agency highlighted.
According to the latest estimates by the World Health Organization and Unicef, this regional decline in immunization has left 2.4 million infants, one in four children under the age of one, unprotected against preventable diseases through immunization.
In addition, they noted that more than 1.7 million of these children are medically qualified as zero doses, meaning that they have never received any vaccination.
Meanwhile, those living in the poorest households are almost three times more likely to have never been immunized in their lifetime than those in the wealthiest households, the new report revealed.
Unicef’s regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, Garry Conille said that diseases such as diphtheria, measles and polio, once thought to have been eradicated in many countries, are reappearing throughout the region, endangering the lives of the most marginalized children and the well-being of all.”
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