By Joyce Remi-Babayeju
The United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, said Nigeria’s post COVID-19 routine immunization fall puts children at the risk of disease outbreaks.
A new data released by WHO and UNICEF yesterday, revealed that despite the rebounding of immunization services in some countries, low and medium income countries like Nigeria still fall short of pre-pandemic levels, thereby putting children at grave risk from disease outbreaks.
Presently, childhood immunization coverage in Nigeria is underway through the big catch-up in line with the global immunization catch up strategy, which is targeting its 2.2 million zero dose children, WHO/ UNICEF said.
The WHO, UNICEF data also revealed that in 2022, 20.5 million children missed out on one or more vaccines during routine immunization exercise, compared to 24.4 million children in 2021.
Despite this improvement, the number remains higher than the 18.4 million children who missed out in 2019 before pandemic-related disruptions, underscoring the need for ongoing catch-up, recovery, and system strengthening efforts.
The vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTP) is used as the global marker for immunization coverage.
Of the 20.5 million children who missed out on one or more doses of their DTP vaccines in 2022, 14.3 children million did not receive a single dose.
The frequency represents an improvement from the 18.1 million zero-dose children in 2021 but remains higher than the 12.9 million children in 2019.
Furthermore, Vaccination against measles – one of the most infectious pathogens – has not recovered from the post COVID-19 pandemic as well as other vaccines, putting an additional 35.2 million children at risk of measles infection.
First dose measles coverage increased to 83 percent in 2022 from 81 percent in 2021 but remained lower than the 86 percent achieved in 2019.
Last year, 21.9 million children missed the routine measle’s vaccination in their first year of life—2.7 million more than in 2019 – while an additional 13.3 million did not receive their second dose, placing children in under-vaccinated communities at risk of outbreaks.