Karachi:
Pakistan has become the second largest country with the largest number of children with zero doses of vaccines in southern Asia after India, according to a media report, citing a new study by British Medical Journal Lancet.
The study found that Pakistan had 419,000 children falling into that category of zero vaccine. Pakistan is one of the last two countries in the world, along with Afghanistan, where polyomyelitis remains endemic, despite global efforts to eradicate the virus.
The Lancet said in a press release that a new important analysis of the collaborators of coverage of the vaccine against the study of the study of global disease, said that despite the progress of the last 50 years, the last two decades have also been marked by child vaccination rates and a wide variation in the vaccine coverage.
In 2019, he said, the WHO established ambitious objectives to improve vaccine coverage worldwide through the 2030 immunization agenda. However, he added the challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving millions of children vulnerable to preventable diseases and death.
The authors of the study, “global, regional and national trends in the children’s vaccination coverage from 1980 to 2023 with forecasts until 2030,” they said that the latest estimates should be taken as a “clear warning” that the 2030 objective would not be achieved without “transformative improvements.”
The objectives of the IA2030 included in half the number of children ‘zero dose’, estimated as children under 1 years who have not received any doses of the Diftheria-Tetanus -pertusis vaccine. The program also aimed to achieve a global coverage of 90% for each of the life course vaccines.
