Vaccination Week for the Americas, PAHO moves to catch up for the decades of progress lost in Pandemic

In one week the America’s will be entering Vaccination Week

April 22, 2022 – The multi-National event  will take place from April 23 through 30th and is in its 20th staging, the history of Vaccination Week in the Americas dates to a 2002 proposal by the Ministers of Health of the Andean Region, following the last endemic measles outbreak in the Americas.

The Pan American Health Organization says the Americas are now facing another measles outbreak after having been declared free of this disease in 2016.

Assistant director of PAHO, Dr. Jarvis Barbosa explained weeks ago that in only two years the Americas have regressed three decades as vaccination levels are now as low as they were in 1994 for measles and polio.

Brazil has had several outbreaks of measles.

Twinned with this event will be the 11th World Immunization Week (WIW) under the call to action “Are you fully vaccinated? Get all your shots.”

Not only are there high levels of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in the Caribbean but the pandemic has pushed routine vaccinations in the region back 30 years according to PAHO.

PAHO says 806 million people have been vaccinated during annual vaccination weeks  since the inception in 2002.