The Global Progress of Vaccines

The Covid-19 pandemic might have been the cause for billions of new vaccinations given out, but due to lockdowns and other restrictions that it brought about, global vaccine coverage suffered. In 2023, childhood vaccine coverage has recovered, leaving just a small dip behind for the years 2020 and 2021 when looking at the grand scheme of things.

New data by the WHO shows that the share of 1-year-olds globally who have received common childhood vaccinations like polio, tetanus, tuberculosis and Hepatitis B in 2023 remained stable compared to 2022. This means that currently between 83 percent and 87 percent of 1-year-olds have received these vaccines worldwide. Coverage for less common vaccines, for example against Pneumococcal disease and Rotavirus, continued to increase their coverage rapidly.

Global vaccine coverage made strides in the past 40 years before stagnating, as very common vaccines struggled to go the "last mile" of reaching all children, including those in unstable countries and war zones. Growing vaccine skepticism - including in developed countries - is posing another challenge.

In 1980, only around 20 percent of children in the world had received the vaccines for tuberculosis, DTP (diphtheria/tetanus/whooping cough) and polio. While the former two were developed in the 1920s, the polio vaccine became commercially available in 1961. Coverage rates for the three diseases rose to approximately 80 percent in the ten years up until 1990.

The immunization against Hepatitis B, the world’s first genetically modified vaccine, was made available in the early 1980s and also reached a global coverage of 80 percent in 2012. Measles vaccinations, on the other hand, have been available since the 1960s but have only reached around 74 percent of children globally (two doses), about the same as the HIB vaccine against a virus causing meningitis.