By :| Keywords : WHO, UNICEF, vaccintions
French.china.org.cn| Updated on 16-07-2020-
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The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned on Wednesday of an alarming drop in the number of children receiving life-saving vaccines worldwide.
“Vaccines are one of the most powerful tools in the history of public health, and more children are vaccinated today than ever before,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of WHO.
“But the pandemic has jeopardized this progress. The avoidable suffering and death caused by children who are not systematically vaccinated could be far greater than COVID-19 itself,” he added.
According to the head of the WHO, vaccines can be administered safely even during the pandemic.
The decline in the number of children receiving vaccines is due to disruptions in the delivery and use of immunization services caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to new data from WHO and UNICEF, these disruptions threaten to reverse hard-won progress in reaching more children and adolescents with a wider range of vaccines, which has already been hampered by a decade of delay in immunization coverage, which stagnated at 85% for almost a decade before the COVID-19 pandemic, with 14 million infants unvaccinated each year.
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