🌎 HPV vaccination, which prevents cervical cancer in our young women and girls, has also stalled across the Region due to school 🏫 disruptions.
🌎 While we have no active polio cases in the Region, recent cases in places like Israel and Malawi serve as a dire warning for the threat we could face if we don’t bring coverage levels back up ⬆️ soon.
🌎 And once pervasive diseases 🦠 such as diphtheria and yellow fever threaten to resurge, unless we act quickly.
@Jarbas_Barbosa #COVID19
🌎 In parts of Brazil, we have ongoing outbreaks of measles, a disease our Region had once eliminated, despite the great efforts that the country is making to interrupt the circulation of measles.
@Jarbas_Barbosa #COVID19
🌎 In two years, we’ve rolled back nearly 3️⃣ decades of progress on polio and measles, putting us back to the same vaccination levels 📊 we had in 1994.
@Jarbas_Barbosa #COVID19
🌎 Vaccine coverage for polio, measles and rubella, diphtheria, and other childhood diseases had been falling even before COVID struck.
The heavy impact of the pandemic 🦠 only made this worse.
@Jarbas_Barbosa #COVID19 twitter.com/pahowho/status…
🌎 And even in places with high overall coverage, some of the most vulnerable, such as the immunocompromised and the elderly, have not yet been protected, leaving them and our health systems 🏥 at risk.
🌎 21 countries and territories have yet to vaccinate half of their population.
🌎 Now, many countries and territories are on track to reach the 70% coverage target by June of 2022.
Eight countries and territories have vaccinated more than 80% of their population.
But we still have a lot of work ahead to improve our resilience to #COVID19
🌎 Over the course of the pandemic, vaccines 🩹 have been prioritized by Presidents, Ministers of Finance, and other decision-makers, and they’ve been embraced by the public.
@Jarbas_Barbosa #COVID19 twitter.com/pahowho/status…
