Vaccination with triple viral drops and has low coverage – 01/08/2023 – Health

In the period from 2006 to 2020, vaccination with the first dose of the MMR, indicated from 12 months of age to prevent measles, mumps and rubella, showed an annual drop of 1.2% across the country. In cities with lower income, the decrease was more pronounced and reached 1.6% per year.

The overall reduction documented meant that, in 2020, less than half of Brazilian municipalities, with the exception of those in the Southeast region, reached the 95% coverage target.

The conclusion was from a study published this Tuesday (1st) in the journal Plos Global Public Health. Signed by authors from Brazil and the United Kingdom, the survey compiled data on the application of the vaccine in 5,565 municipalities in Brazil between 2006 and 2020.

To arrive at the presented conclusions, the scientists adopted the IBP (Brazilian Deprivation Index). Julia Pescarini, an associate researcher at Cidacs (Center for the Integration of Data and Knowledge for Health) at Fiocruz Bahia and one of the authors of the article, explains that the index takes into account different indicators, such as income, family composition and possession of goods by people who live in a domicile. From there, the data of the entire municipality are grouped and then a metric is arrived at on the material deprivation of the city.

In the study, municipalities were stratified into five groups depending on the level of PPI – for example, there was a grouping of cities with the highest level of deprivation, while another of municipalities with less deprivation. Then, this division was compared with the vaccination numbers of the cities.

The researchers observed that the locations with the lowest income according to the IBP were those with the highest overall vaccine coverage with the triple viral vaccine. However, these were also the municipalities that had the most annual drop in the first dose of immunizer – the decrease, as previously mentioned, was 1.6% in these cities and 0.6% among the richest ones.

Nationally, without distinguishing between cities, the drop in the first application was 1.2% per year.

“In Brazil as a whole, vaccination coverage had been decreasing for some time, but it was falling at a slightly lower speed until 2014 or 2015. Then, it starts to decrease at a slightly faster pace and in 2020, the first year of pandemic of Covid-19, it drops a lot”, summarizes Pescarini. Between 2014 and 2019, for example, there was a reduction of 2.3% each year.

The health crisis may partially explain the drop in coverage, as the exceptional scenario caused by Sars-CoV-2 has disrupted many health services.

Therefore, the lower coverage with the triple virus must have other reasons. One of them is related to vaccination campaigns. The researcher claims that, in mid-2014, the Ministry of Health had a budget drop, which impacted the financing of campaigns, important to motivate the population to get vaccinated.

She also mentions that it is important to think about vaccination sites modeled for the reality of the vaccine’s target audience. “If we think about childhood vaccination, the best place is at school”, she exemplifies. Many children stopped being vaccinated in the Covid-19 pandemic and, to date, have not taken all vaccines.

“If you don’t do that, in a year or two we’ll start to see several outbreaks of all the diseases that the vaccine protects against. It’s a danger”, says the researcher.