Although only one in eight children in Gavi-supported countries do not receive any vaccines, zero-dose children account for nearly half of all vaccine-preventable deaths. In 2020, 12.4 million of the 72.5 million children that Gavi aims to reach in lower-income countries do not receive a single vaccine shot, leaving them vulnerable to some of the world’s deadliest diseases. However, despite this progress, millions of children are still being left behind. Created in 2000 and bringing together a range of organisations working to improve access to immunisation in lower-income countries, from governments and UN agencies, to vaccine industry and civil society organisations, the Vaccine Alliance now helps to immunise almost half the world’s children. One of the key factors in this extraordinary progress was the creation of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
Millions more children are now growing up protected.
The number of children dying from vaccine-preventable diseases in these countries has dropped by 70%. In lower-income countries 78% of children received routine vaccines in 2020, despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, up from 59% in 2000, and more than 500 new vaccine programmes have been introduced and scaled up. Ten years of decline has turned into twenty years of growth. Two decades later we have a lot to celebrate. Nearly 50% of zero-dose children live in three key geographic contexts: urban areas, remote communities and populations in conflict settings. Ultimately, it was the children left unprotected against deadly diseases like measles, polio and pneumonia that suffered the consequences. Since 1990 immunisation coverage in lower-income countries had started to stagnate, and had even declined, and the poorest countries had to wait an average of seven years after the richest before getting access to new vaccines. Twenty years ago, the global effort to ensure every child has access to vaccines was stuck in a rut.
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