London: People around the world have lost faith in the importance of routine childhood vaccines against deadly diseases like measles and polio during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new UNICEF report.
The UN agency said public perception of vaccines for children is expected to decline between 2019 and 2021 in 52 of the 55 countries surveyed.
The United Nations children’s fund, UNICEF, said the data was a “worrying warning sign” of growing vaccine hesitancy amid misinformation, declining trust in governments and political polarization.
“We cannot allow faith in routine vaccinations to fall victim to a pandemic,” UNICEF executive director Catherine Russell said in a statement. “Otherwise, the next wave of deaths could be more children with measles, diphtheria or other preventable diseases.”
The agency said the change in perception was particularly worrisome, as it comes after the largest sustained decline in childhood immunizations in a generation during the COVID disruptions.
Overall, 67 million children missed out on one or more potentially life-saving vaccines during the pandemic, and efforts to catch up have so far stalled even as the outbreak escalates.
According to UNICEF’s flagship annual Status of the World’s Children report, the picture of vaccine trust varies globally.
In countries including Papua New Guinea and South Korea, agreement with the statement “vaccines are important for children” dropped by 44%, and by more than a third in Ghana, Senegal and Japan. In the United States, it declined by 13.6 percentage points. The report said that trust in India, China and Mexico is broadly similar or has increased.
The report stresses that vaccine belief can easily change and the results may not indicate a long-term trend.
Despite the decline in confidence, more than 80% of respondents in nearly half the countries surveyed still said childhood vaccines were important.
The data was collected by the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
(Reporting by Jennifer Rigby and Emma Farge; Editing by Bill Bercott)
Disclaimer: This report is generated automatically from Reuters news service. ThePrint is not responsible for its content.