Daijiworld Media Network – Geneva

Geneva, Jul 15: Global childhood vaccination coverage recorded a modest improvement in 2025, but millions of children continued to remain unprotected against preventable diseases as conflicts, funding cuts and disease outbreaks hampered immunisation efforts, according to the latest estimates released by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF on Wednesday.

The report said 90 per cent of infants worldwide, or nearly 116 million children, received at least one dose of the diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTP) vaccine in 2025, while 85 per cent completed all three recommended doses.

Despite the progress, UNICEF warned that the gains remain fragile.

"The gains that we are celebrating now at this moment are quite fragile," said Ephrem Lemango, UNICEF's global immunisation chief, cautioning that they "can be eroded very easily".

The number of "zero-dose" children — those who have not received a single routine vaccine — declined to 13.5 million in 2025 from 14.2 million in 2024. However, the figure remains nearly four million higher than the level required to keep the world on track to halve the 2019 total by 2030.

Lemango said more than half of the world's unvaccinated children live in conflict-affected countries, including Syria, Yemen, Sudan and Palestine, even though these nations account for only around one-third of global births.

The WHO said the impact of global funding cuts, which began in early 2025, has not yet been fully reflected in the latest data, but warned that they pose serious risks to immunisation programmes in 2026.

"We are seeing real cracks in the system now for immunization, and we are previewing big risks that are yet to come," said Kate O'Brien, director of the WHO Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals.

O'Brien said the organisation is already witnessing the consequences of these challenges through rising outbreaks of measles, diphtheria and cholera in several parts of the world.