“Long Life For All” is the theme for World Immunization Week 2022, which is celebrated during the last week of April every year with the goal of raising awareness about the importance of taking collective action to promote the use of vaccines to protect people from deadly diseases.
The global health campaign aims to increase rates of immunization against vaccine-preventable diseases around the world. It is one of 11 official health campaigns that is marked by the World Health Organization (WHO).
This year’s World Immunization Week 2022 theme of “Long Life For All” highlights the importance of vaccines in helping people live long, healthy and fulfilling lives so that they can follow their dreams and protect their loved ones, according to worldimmunizationweek.org.
Despite significant focus on vaccines in the past couple of years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people have been lagging behind in immunizations against other diseases, particularly in developing countries. The WHO says part of this was due to interruptions in immunization services, which resulted in the resurgence of several deadly childhood diseases including polio, measles, pneumonia and diarrhea.
Therefore, as part of its World Immunization Week campaign, the WHO is relaying the message that “it’s time to get essential immunization back on track,” through the launch of catch-up campaigns to ensure that “everyone, everywhere has access to life-saving vaccines.”
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According to Unicef, over 13 million children around the world under the age of one did not receive vaccines of any kind even before COVID-19-related disruptions to immunizations began occurring. The resurfacing of polio in several countries including Afghanistan, Pakistan and Malaysia has raised significant alarm bells, leading to a new global battle against the debilitating disease.
Access to vaccines remains a problem in the developing world. According to the WHO, only one in ten people in low-income countries are vaccinated against COVID-19. This has been due to several factors, including vaccination campaigns that failed to reach people who needed them the most, inequitable vaccine distribution and socioeconomic barriers to access. The health agency says the spread of vaccine misinformation campaigns compounded these issues as they eroded some people’s confidence in vaccines.
Vaccine hesitancy among marginalized communities even in first-world countries like the US has been a problem during the pandemic. Black people and other communities of color including Hispanic and Indigenous groups have had the lowest rates of COVID-19 vaccination in the country.
The general perception has been that vaccine hesitancy is to blame for the low immunization rates among these groups due to mistrust of the medical community because of centuries of maltreatment. However, polls show that access may be a more significant determinant for the low rates of vaccine uptake. For example, Black and Hispanic people have cited taking time off from work to get vaccinated and traveling to vaccination sites as significant concerns in getting immunized.
Vaccines are not only life-saving against infectious diseases, but they can also prevent some types of cancers caused by viruses like the herpes simplex virus (HPV).
Vaccines have been the single most effective tool “for saving lives and livelihoods against in the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to the WHO’s Director-General Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus.
Since Dr. Edward Jenner’s creation of the world’s first vaccine in 1796 against smallpox, World Immunization Week 2022 is a time to take action on continuing to use vaccines to help save lives and eradicate the world’s most contentious and deadliest diseases.
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