Millions of kids have missed routine vaccines thanks to COVID-19
Missed shots due to the coronavirus have dramatically cut vaccination rates
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced millions of children around the world to miss out on important childhood vaccinations, increasing the risk of dangerous outbreaks of other infectious diseases, new research suggests.
Amid the spread of the coronavirus, an estimated 9 million more children than expected didn’t get a first dose of the measles vaccine in 2020, researchers report July 14 in a modelling study in the Lancet. Another 8.5 million children are projected to have missed a third dose of the DTP shot for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, or whooping cough.
The World Health Organization and other public health agencies warned last year that the COVID-19 pandemic would disrupt routine childhood vaccinations. Those missing vaccinations could put vulnerable children at risk during outbreaks of highly contagious diseases, like the 2014 measles outbreak at Disneyland in California (SN: 11/13/20). The news also comes as health officials in Tennessee plan to halt all outreach to get adolescents vaccinated to prevent not only COVID-19 but also other infectious diseases.
“We’ve lost over 4 million people to COVID,” says Suzette Oyeku, a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, both located in New York City. “How many additional lives do we want to lose for not protecting people against stuff that we know we can protect?”