UN: Millions of children missing out on routine vaccinations

The UN warned of a “perfect storm” on Thursday as a raging pandemic continues to severely disrupt access to basic vaccines for millions of children.

Last year, some 23 million children missed out on routine inoculations for infections such as diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough, as health care was hit worldwide by the coronavirus pandemic. The figure is an increase of 3.7 million from 2019, according to data published by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF.

Up to 17 million children likely did not receive “a single vaccine” during the year, exposing major inequities in access, and representing “an alarming rise,” UNICEF tweeted. India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mexico and Mali were among the countries worst affected.

UN calls for urgent action

And the UN said it may get even worse. “In 2021, we have potentially a perfect storm about to happen,” Kate O’Brien, head of the WHO’s vaccines and immunization department, told reporters.

She warned there was now “an accumulation of children who are not immune because they haven’t received vaccines, and more and more transmission because of too early release of public health and social measures.”

“This is the sort of perfect storm we’re ringing the alarm bell about right now,” O’Brien continued, stressing the WHO’s “high concern about these very outbreak-prone diseases”.

“We need to act now in order to protect these children.”

Conflict and poverty increase the problem

Most of the children affected live in places hamstrung by conflict, in remote communities, or slums where they face multiple deprivations.

Parents were confronted with medical facilities that were closed or feared they would be infected with COVID-19 if they entered a health care environment.

The WHO’s South-East Asian and Eastern Mediterranean regions were worst affected, according to the figures.

COVID-19 exacerbates the problem

However, as access to health services and immunization outreach were curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of children not receiving even their very first vaccinations increased in all regions, according to the data.

Henrietta Fore, UNICEF’s executive director said: “Even before the pandemic, there were worrying signs that we were beginning to lose ground in the fight to immunize children against preventable child illness, including with the widespread measles outbreaks two years ago.”

“The pandemic has made a bad situation worse. With the equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines at the forefront of everyone’s minds, we must remember that vaccine distribution has always been inequitable, but it does not have to be,” she said in a statement.

• David Seymour’s ‘Children of Europe’

  Tereska’s notion of home

  When David Seymour photographed children in devastated Europe after World War II (1939-45) for the UN project “Children of Europe,” he also traveled to Poland. As a Jew, Seymour had left his homeland in 1932. In a special school in Warsaw in 1948, he took pictures of Tereska, then seven or eight years old, who had drawn her “home” on a blackboard.

• David Seymour’s ‘Children of Europe’

  Walking home from school, passing by the ghetto

  Dawid Szymin was born in Warsaw on November 20, 1911. When “Chim,” as he was nicknamed, was granted US citizenship during the war, he took the name David Seymour. In 1948, he photographed schoolchildren on their way home in the city of his birth. In the process, they passed by the ruins of the ghetto where the city’s Jewish population was imprisoned during the German occupation.

• David Seymour’s ‘Children of Europe’

  First day of school

  For the “Children of Europe” project, Chim traveled for several months through five European countries to document the situation of children and the work of the United Nations’ Children’s Fund, UNICEF. In Hungary, he took pictures of children on their first day of school after summer, in September 1948, in the village of Pilis, 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the capital Budapest.

• David Seymour’s ‘Children of Europe’

  Omaha Beach, Normandy in summer 1947

  The year before, Seymour had already traveled to France, Germany and Great Britain for the US magazine “This Week.” In Normandy, France, he photographed children playing in the sand on Omaha Beach, right next to the rusty remnants of the invasion on June 6, 1944, when Allied troops landed on “D-Day,” making the end of World War II possible.

• David Seymour’s ‘Children of Europe’

  David ‘Chim’ Seymour (1911-1956)

  David Seymour served as a US soldier during World War II and worked in London as a “photography interpreter”: He assessed images and aerial photographs to prepare Allied attacks. Chim (shown here in a portrait by an unknown photographer in the early 1950s) lost almost his entire family in the Holocaust. He died on November 10, 1956.

• David Seymour’s ‘Children of Europe’

  Focus on children in Germany in 1947

  For his “This Week” assignment, Seymour took photos in Berlin and the Ruhr region in 1947. Again, his main subjects were children, like these two in front of the Brandenburg Gate. For Chim, children and young people were the true but unseen victims of war. His photo reportage “We went back” from 1947 is regarded as preparatory work for the UN photo project the following year.

• David Seymour’s ‘Children of Europe’

  New life among the ruins in Essen, 1947

  Due to the dismantling of the steel factories, which played such a central role during the war, the West German city of Essen looked like a ghost town. Here, Chim met a young German woman pushing her newborn child, wrapped in white blankets, in a baby carriage. The infant was born out of wedlock; the father, a British occupation soldier. The future appeared uncertain for everyone.

• David Seymour’s ‘Children of Europe’

  Smiling despite difficulties

  “I would like to speak a little about myself, but mainly about the 13,000,000 abandoned children in Europe who had their first experience of life in an atmosphere of death and destruction,” Chim wrote. They were often sick, poor, wounded in body and soul, but Chim also captured their resilience: Even wearing a corset due to spinal tuberculosis, this girl in a Vienna hospital managed a smile.

• David Seymour’s ‘Children of Europe’

  Vaccination against TB

  Formerly known as the “Viennese disease,” tuberculosis (TB) was widespread in Austria and its capital at the beginning of the 20th century. When Seymour photographed these schoolchildren in 1948, the boys were waiting to be vaccinated against the infectious disease.

• David Seymour’s ‘Children of Europe’

  Life on the street

  In addition to Poland, Hungary and Austria, Seymour also traveled to Italy for the UN photo project. There, he documented the lives of street kids trying to somehow make ends meet, by legal and illegal means. In the southern Italian city of Naples, Chim photographed these teenagers smoking.

• David Seymour’s ‘Children of Europe’

  A little girl selling cigs

  Also in Naples, Seymour photographed a little girl selling cigarettes. To survive after the war, children went begging, made street music, sold black market goods or prostituted themselves. Chim returned to Italy in 1950; he loved to linger in places steeped in history, saying, “I’m a Southerner.” He continued his insightful photography during that trip.

• David Seymour’s ‘Children of Europe’

  Kids want to play

  In 1948, Villa Savoia in Rome was home to children who had been injured by the war or while collecting old munitions: They had lost their eyesight or limbs, but were encouraged to develop their remaining muscles with exercise. In his photographs, Seymour made a point of showing children not only as victims, but also in their everyday lives with a desire for normality.

• David Seymour’s ‘Children of Europe’

  The war after the war

  Seymour traveled to Greece, the fifth country in the “Children of Europe” project, several times after 1945. There, civil war raged from 1946 to 1949 between communists and the army of the conservative government. In this photo in Oxia, Elefteria, about four years old, is happy to have received a pair of shoes from UNICEF. The UN relief organization celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2021.

• David Seymour’s ‘Children of Europe’

  Fleeing children in 1948

  Here, five boys from the Greek district of Promahi are waiting to board the refugee ship SS Samos. During the civil war, tens of thousands of Greek children were evacuated to keep them safe from the fighting in their own country. Previously, during World War II, Greece had been occupied first by Italy, then by Germany.

• David Seymour’s ‘Children of Europe’

  Fleeing children in 2020

  While the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos was burning in September 2020, photographer Angelos Tzortzinis took this picture of refugee children trying to reach safety. The children’s charity UNICEF Germany honored the photograph as “Photo of the Year 2020” in its annual competition, which aims to document the reality of children’s lives.

  Author: Klaudia Prevezanos

jsi/aw (ADP, dpa)

Article source: https://www.dw.com/en/un-millions-of-children-missing-out-on-routine-vaccinations/a-58270345?maca=en-rss-en-all-1573-rdf