(Full report will be published in the Weekly Epidemiological Record on 17.12.2021, and only the wording of the full report should be considered as final)
Recopilado por Carlos Cabrera Lozada. Director del postgrado de Medicina Materno Fetal. Universidad Central de Venezuela. ORCID: 0000-0002-3133-5183. 12/10/2021
Report from the WHO department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals
• The Director’s report focused on equity in vaccination especially in the COVID-19 pandemic context which has exposed and exacerbated inequities in access to immunization.
• Access to COVID-19 vaccines has been extreme in its inequity with high-income countries having administered 35 times more vaccine doses than the low-income countries and the WHO Africa Region countries having only 3% of the population fully vaccinated.
• While the pandemic has affected childhood immunization programmes across the world, the poorest countries have been affected the most and have been the slowest to recover.
• Country experiences show that solutions are available and the Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) well lays out the path to recovery and to building resilient immunization programmes.
WHO Regional updates
• COVID-19 vaccine rollout has started in all WHO regions though the pace of vaccination varies considerably between and within regions, driven largely by the unequal access to vaccine supply. Fifty-six countries found predominantly in the Africa and Eastern Mediterranean regions were
unable to achieve the target of fully vaccinating 10% of their populations by September 2021, largely because of lack of vaccine doses.
• As vaccine supplies improve, the WHO regional offices and partner agencies are supporting country preparedness to overcome existing operational challenges and scale up vaccination to reach the goal of 70% coverage by June 2022.
• Countries in all regions experienced a decline in coverage with routine childhood vaccination, though the magnitude of the decline and the speed of recovery varied.
• All the regions have developed or are in the process of developing action plans to operationalize IA2030 in their respective regions. This will provide an opportunity to accelerate recovery and to strengthen the resilience of immunization programmes.