The Herald

This week, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, announced that Hungarian-American biochemist Katalin Karikó and American immunologist Drew Weissman were the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine. The research work that earned them this award served as the basis for the development of a type of vaccine against COVID-19. Supported by the same results, several groups of researchers around the world are working to achieve new, more effective and safe vaccines, including vaccines against some types of cancer.

The history of vaccines dates back to the late 18th century, when Edward Jenner, a British doctor, developed the first smallpox vaccine. Almost 200 years after Jenner vaccinated the first patient, humanity celebrated the global eradication of this disease in 1980. Upon reaching this milestone, the power of immunizations in the control of infectious diseases was fully evident.

In the field of vaccination, once the challenge of developing the vaccine has been overcome, the challenge of making it accessible to the greatest number of people must be faced. In the last century, significant progress has been made in vaccination coverage worldwide; However, great challenges still persist regarding its equitable distribution.

Inequity in the distribution of all vaccines has worsened in the last 10 years in Latin America and the Caribbean. This region has gone from having one of the highest childhood vaccination rates in the world to being lagging behind, even on the verge of being surpassed by Africa. In this corner of the planet, some 2.4 million children have not received the complete schedule of main vaccines, including many who do not have any doses. It is ethically unacceptable that one in four children in our region is exposed to vaccine-preventable infections such as hepatitis B, measles or tetanus. Poverty, the defunding of health systems and the growing political and social instability of the continent seem to be the causes of this abrupt decline in vaccination coverage.

In many regions in the interior of Colombia, the situation is not very different from that described. Although in large capitals, vaccination coverage figures are comparable with those of the first world, in remote regions of our geography, vaccination rates hardly exceed those of the poorest countries on the planet.

Now, when the same factors that have deteriorated coverage in Latin America and the Caribbean seem to converge in our country, we as a civil society must set off all our alarms, because our survival, and that of our loved ones, will also depend on having a national program. of immunizations that is robust and universal.

It would be unfortunate if, while the world celebrates the development of new vaccines, in our country we return to the times when we massively regretted the deaths caused by vaccine-preventable diseases.

@hmbaquero

hmbaquero@gmail.com

2023-10-06 05:00:00
#Vaccines #equity