Measuring routine childhood vaccination coverage in 204 countries and territories

What is it about?

Measuring routine childhood vaccination is crucial to inform global vaccine policies and programme implementation, and to track progress towards targets set by the Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP) and Immunization Agenda 2030. Robust estimates of routine vaccine coverage are needed to identify past successes and persistent vulnerabilities. Drawing from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2020, Release 1, we did a systematic analysis of global, regional, and national vaccine coverage trends using a statistical framework, by vaccine and over time.

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Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Drawing from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2020, Release 1, our analysis provides annual estimates of routine vaccine coverage for 11 vaccine-dose combinations from 1980 to 2019 in 204 countries and territories. Our modelling approach incorporates time-varying and location-varying bias adjustments, leverages temporal trends and covariate relationships to estimate vaccine coverage in the absence of country-specific data, and quantifies uncertainty for all estimates. We use these coverage estimates and GBD population estimates to quantify the number of zero-dose children (ie, children who have never received a dose of a diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis [DTP] vaccine as a proxy) over time; measure progress towards the Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP) 2020 targets of at least 90% coverage across all childhood vaccines by 2019; and analyse the relationships between national-level vaccine coverage and sociodemographic development.