BOGOTA (Reuters) -The Americas is facing an impending crisis in routine vaccinations because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said on Wednesday, and vaccinations against COVID are behind where they should be.
Vaccine-preventable diseases like measles, influenza, whooping cough, tetanus and other illnesses are all likely to increase if immunizations fall, PAHO Director Carissa Etienne said during the group’s weekly press conference.
“The region is facing an impending crisis around routine vaccination and ongoing attention must be given as a priority to sustaining and strengthening the immunization and other essential health programs,” Etienne said.
“Unless we improve our routine immunization programs the region is at high risk of new and re-emerging outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases.”
The early days of the COVID pandemic saw a significant decline in routine vaccines, despite the Americas’ long history of high vaccination rates.
“The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has put an additional strain on the national expanded program on immunization, but also on healthcare systems, while at the same time deflecting considerable resources to the emergency response operation.”
Though 48% of people in Latin America and Caribbean are now fully immunized against COVID, vaccination rates are much lower in countries including Jamaica, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Haiti.
PAHO is working with manufacturers to secure additional vaccine doses, Etienne added, but the region should have been much farther along in immunization by now.
“The pace of vaccination is not where we would like it to be yet,” Etienne said. “This is not the time to relax public health and social distancing measures.”
“We should have been much further than we are now if we had sufficient access to vaccines but also if people were complying.”
Coronavirus infections rose last week after two consecutive months of decline – with 700,000 new cases and 13,000 COVID-related deaths reported.
(Reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb; Editing by David Gregorio)
