Countries With Universal Health Care Had Better Child Vaccination Rates During Pandemic

By Cara Murez HealthDay Reporter
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, Aug. 18, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Countries which can be nearer to attaining common well being protection noticed smaller declines in routine childhood vaccinations through the pandemic, a brand new research reveals.

The World Health Organization describes common well being protection as “all people and communities obtain the well being companies they want with out struggling monetary hardship.”

Researchers have been in a position to make use of the pandemic as a “pure experiment” to match variations in childhood immunization protection based mostly on nations’ progress towards common well being protection.

“Our findings strongly counsel that policymakers ought to proceed to advocate for insurance policies aimed toward attaining common well being protection in coming years,” mentioned the research authors, who included Yesim Tozan, an assistant professor at New York University’s School of Global Public Health.

“This research additionally units the stage for future analysis in understanding the synergistic influence of investments in world well being safety and common well being protection methods on nations’ well being system resilience,” they mentioned.

The staff used immunization knowledge from WHO/UNICEF, which incorporates info on 195 nations and 14 childhood vaccines between 1997 and 2020.

The research additionally used the 2019 Universal Health Coverage (UHC) Service Coverage Index, a measure that represents stage of protection.

Countries who had a excessive UHC index have been related to a 2.7% smaller decline in childhood vaccination protection throughout 2020 when in comparison with nations with a decrease UHC index.

Before the pandemic, nations with a excessive UHC index had a median childhood immunization protection charge of 92.7%. By comparability, these with a decrease UHC index had a protection charge of 86.2%.

In 2020, the protection charge was 91.9% in excessive UHC nations, whereas it was 81.7% in nations with a decrease UHC index.

The findings have been printed Aug. 16 within the journal PLOS Medicine .

“The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the supply of important well being companies throughout nations worldwide,” Tozan mentioned in a journal information launch. “This research supplied the much-needed quantitative proof of the protecting results of common well being protection in instances of public well being crises.”

More info

The World Health Organization has extra on common well being protection.

SOURCE: PLOS Medicine, information launch, Aug. 16, 2022