By IJEOMA UKAZU
The COVID-19 pandemic, according to health experts, has unravel years of success recorded in routine immunization across the globe and exposed children to deadly preventable diseases.
While immunization services have started to recover from disruptions caused by COVID-19, millions of children remain vulnerable to these killer diseases.
The Director-General, World Health Organisation, WHO, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, ” In all regions, rising numbers of children miss vital first vaccine doses in 2020; millions more miss later vaccines, Disruptions in immunization services were widespread in 2020, with the WHO Southeast Asian and Eastern Mediterranean Regions most affected.
“Access to health services and immunization outreach were curtailed, the number of children not receiving even their very first vaccinations increased in all regions. As compared with 2019, 3.5 million more children missed their first dose of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine, DTP-1 while three million more children missed their first measles dose.”
Ghebreyesus said, “If we’re to avoid multiple outbreaks of life-threatening diseases like measles, yellow fever and diphtheria, we must ensure routine vaccination services are protected in every country in the world”.
He hinted that, even as countries clamour to get their hands on COVID-19 vaccines, we have gone backwards on other vaccinations, leaving children at risk from devastating but preventable diseases like measles, polio or meningitis.
Ghebreyesus said, “Multiple disease outbreaks would be catastrophic for communities and health systems already battling COVID-19, making it more urgent than ever to invest in childhood vaccination and ensure every child is reached.”
Similarly, the Executive Director, United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF Henrietta Fore said that, “this evidence should be a clear warning – the COVID-19 pandemic and related disruptions cost us valuable ground we cannot afford to lose – and the consequences will be paid in the lives and wellbeing of the most vulnerable.
“Even before the pandemic, there were worrying signs that we were beginning to lose ground in the fight to immunize children against preventable child illness, including with the widespread measles outbreaks two years ago.”
Fore said, the pandemic has made a bad situation worse, adding that, with the equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines at the forefront of everyone’s minds, we must remember that vaccine distribution has always been inequitable, but it does not have to be.
In a statement, the Chief Executive Officer, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, Dr. Seth Berkley said ” it is a wake-up call – we cannot allow a legacy of COVID-19 to be the resurgence of measles, polio and other killers. We all need to work together to help countries both defeat COVID-19, by ensuring global, equitable access to vaccines, and get routine immunization programmes back on track. The future health and wellbeing of millions of children and their communities across the globe depends on it.”
He said, concerns are not just for outbreak-prone diseases, already at low rates, vaccinations against Human Papillomavirus, HPV which protect girls against cervical cancer later in life, have been highly affected by school closures.
Continuing, he said, as a result, across countries that have introduced HPV vaccine to date, approximately 1.6 million more girls missed out in 2020. Globally only 13 percent girls were vaccinated against HPV, falling from 15 percent in 2019.
In Nigeria, experts are worried that the six months of COVID-19 lockdown imposed by the federal government of Nigeria in 2020 to control the spread of the Coronavirus disease, did not only take a deep toll on the country’s economy, but has also hampered routine immunization across the country.
Speaking on RI situation in Nigeria, the coordinator for COVID-19 vaccination in Adamawa State, Abba Muhammad Isawa, revealed that, the possible reasons for low RI coverage in the country is that, most Nigerians lack awareness, education and are not involved at the community level.
He said, “when a caregiver takes a child for immunization, she does not know that she needs to bring the child again for another round. She assumes that when the child is being vaccinated during campaigns, the child is fully immunized.
“This gap in knowledge is due to lack of the involvement of the community people and allowing them take ownership of the immunization activities”.
He said, “when we established the National Emergency Routine Immunisation Centre, NERIC few years ago, we used the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey/National Immunization Coverage Survey 2016-17, which shows that Nigeria has 33 percent national coverage..
Isawa who made this statement during a three-day media dialogue on Routine Immunisation in Yola organised by the Federal Ministry of Information and Culture in collaboration with the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF said that, “We were supposed to conduct another survey last year but due to the COVID-19 pandemic we could not do so. But we are planning to conduct another survey so that we can compare the figures and know where we are as a country.”
Contributing, the Communication for Development, Specialist, UNICEF, Mrs Elizabeth Onitolo added that, “No child must die of polio again in Nigeria; Polio could still resurface even after the country had been certified free of polio by the World Health Organisation”.