Over the past year, efforts to increase the vaccination of preventable diseases in children, such as polio, measles, and rotavirus, were interrupted by lockdowns. With COVID-19 vaccine rollouts underway, health experts are concerned that it could exacerbate the situation as health workers are overburdened and funds diverted.
“What we are concerned about is a further decline because immunization staff are diverted to speed up the COVID vaccine rollouts,” Eleonore Antoinette Ba-Nguz, regional immunization coordinator for East and Southern Africa at UNICEF, told Devex.
Stretched thin: Some countries don’t have adequate operational expenses to roll out COVID-19 vaccines, and governments are taking funds from other programs — potentially routine immunization programs, Ba-Nguz said.
Ideally, governments would set up different teams for conducting routine immunizations and handling COVID-19 vaccinations, but there has been little time for planning COVID-19 vaccination campaigns, and so that’s not always happening, she said.
Why this matters: As health workers take on the additional burden of COVID-19 vaccination campaigns, it can lead to congested health clinics and long wait times for parents bringing in kids for immunization.
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“There is no reason why that mother will wait for two hours. She can just decide to [leave] and might decide not to come back. Or she might say to her neighbors: ‘Oh, when you go to the health facility, you will be waiting for three hours,’” Ba-Nguz said, adding that unvaccinated children are at risk of dying from preventable diseases.
Ba-Nguz said UNICEF and the World Health Organization are monitoring the toll of COVID-19 vaccine rollouts on health workers and subsequently routine vaccination programs in the countries they work to collect firm data on the impact.
