Resisting Vaccines
Eliza Barclay
In recent years the contours of the battle against vaccine-preventable diseases have changed dramatically. While immunization rates worldwide are at an all-time high largely because international health institutions are reaching thousands of new children each year, vaccines have also come under fire from parents and critics questioning their safety. Not only are skeptics in countries like the United States and United Kingdom opting out of vaccines, but the anti-vaccine movement has also recently ignited in countries like India and Ukraine.
“What has happened globally is that we are becoming more terrified of vaccines than the diseases themselves,” said John Budd, UNICEF’s chief of communication for Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, who has witnessed active anti-vaccine communities in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Romania derailing vaccination campaigns.
A sudden outbreak of polio in Tajikistan this year has also raised new questions about the exhaustiveness of routine immunization programs in countries certified as polio-free. All of these new challenges are causing vaccine advocates to reexamine their strategies and look for new ways to sustain high immunization coverage and eradication goals.
With the dedication of new funds for research and global immunization drives to beat back and eradicate several vaccine-preventable diseases, vaccines have become more effective and much more widely available. Worldwide, immunizations are at an all-time high and cases of measles, yellow fever, polio, rotavirus, and other vaccine-preventable diseases have fallen dramatically resulting in huge improvements in child mortality. Deaths from measles, for example, fell by 74 percent between 2000 and 2007. But according to a 2009 report by UNICEF, the World Bank and the World Health Organization one in five children, or 24 million infants, are not receiving routine vaccinations.
