NEW DELHI: A whopping 1.44 million children in India did not receive a single shot of any routine vaccination in 2023, a new global study published Wednesday in The Lancet said.The study also stated that India recorded the second-highest number of “zero-dose” children—defined as those lacking access to or never reached by routine immunisation services— after Nigeria. India also stood among the eight countries, along with Nigeria and Ethiopia, where more than half of the unvaccinated children from around the world lived as of 2023, according to an analysis by the Global Burden of Disease Study Vaccine Coverage Collaborators.The report said that more than half of the 15.7 million global zero-dose children resided in just eight countries, with Nigeria topping the list with the largest number of unvaccinated children (2.5 million), followed by India (1.4 million), the Democratic Republic of Congo (882,000), Ethiopia (782,000), Somalia (710,000), Sudan (627,000), Indonesia (538,000) and Brazil (452,000), thus emphasising “persistent inequities”. In India, the Universal Immunisation Programme provides vaccination against 12 diseases, which are offered to children free of cost.The report stated that achieving coverage of 90 percent or greater for each of the life-course vaccines — all three doses of the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTaP) vaccine, two measles vaccines, and the pneumococcal vaccine — is the central target for 2030. Only 18 of 204 countries have already met this target.It also said that children who had never received a routine childhood vaccine further fell by 75 percent fall, “from 58.8 million in 1980 to 14.7 million in 2019, before the Covid-19”. “The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated these challenges, with global rates for these vaccines declining sharply since 2020 and still not returning to pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels as of 2023,” it added.
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