Today, thousands of children will die from diseases that are easy to prevent.
Deadly diseases like measles, polio, tetanus, tuberculosis, diphtheria and whooping cough are all easily and cheaply preventable by vaccination. Yet every day, 16,000 children under five die, usually because they don’t get the health care and life-saving vaccines they need.
UNICEF provides vaccines to immunise almost half of the world’s children against preventable diseases, and with our partners support immunisation programmes in over 95 countries to keep children safe.
Since 1980, UNICEF has helped quadruple immunization rates for children worldwide, saving as many as 3 million young lives every year. That's more than five lives saved every minute of every day.
The World Health Organization named the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines one of the top ten threats to public health in 2019. Vaccine hesitancy caused an alarming global surge of measles outbreaks in 2018, including in high- and middle-income countries.
Today more children are protected than ever before, but there is still more work to be done.