Karachi:
Pakistan has become the second largest country with the greatest number of children with doses of vaccines in South Asia after a new study by British Medical Journal Lancet.
The study revealed that Pakistan had 419,000 children in this zero vaccine category. Pakistan is one of the last two countries in the world, alongside Afghanistan, where polio remains endemic, despite global efforts to eradicate the virus.
The Lancet said in a press release that a new major analysis of employees in the vaccine coverage of the global burden, said that despite progress of the last 50 years, the last two decades have also been marked by the stagnation of infant vaccination rates and a wide variation in vaccine coverage.
In 2019, he said, the WHO set ambitious objectives to improve the coverage of vaccines on a global scale thanks to the 2030 immunization program. However, he added that the challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving millions of children vulnerable to preventable diseases and to death.
The authors of the study, “the global, regional and national trends in routine childhood vaccination coverage from 1980 to 2023 with forecasts until 2030”, said that the latest estimates should be considered a “clear warning” that the 2030 target would not be achieved without “transformative improvements”.
The objectives of the IA2030 half include the number of children “zero” – estimated as children under 1, the program also aimed to reach global coverage of 90% for each of the vaccines for life.
