World Immunization Week 2025: Strengthening Global Protection Against Vaccine Preventable Diseases - Saima Wazed

World Immunization Week, marked annually in the last week of April, promotes the use of vaccines to protect people of all ages against disease.

The goal of World Immunization Week is for more people – and their communities – to be protected from vaccine-preventable diseases, and the theme this year is “Immunization for all is humanly possible.”

WHO not only raises awareness about the value of vaccines and immunization, but also ensures that governments have the necessary guidance and technical support to implement high quality immunization programmes.

What started in 1974 as the Expanded Programme on Immunization focused on six childhood illnesses and has today evolved to thirteen universally recommended vaccines across the life course.

In these 50 years, vaccines have saved at least 154 million lives – a remarkable 6 lives saved each minute, every day, for five decades.

More children now live to see their first birthday than at any other time in human history, and the measles vaccine alone accounts for 60% of those lives saved.

Immunization campaigns have enabled us to eradicate smallpox, eliminate polio in our South-East Asia Region, and bring neonatal and maternal tetanus down to extremely low levels.

It is clear that vaccines are, undoubtably, one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

In our WHO South-East Asia Region, over forty million pregnant women and thirty-seven million newborns are vaccinated annually. We are also a global leader in vaccine production, with 46% of the world's supply.

These achievements are significant, but we have much more to do. More than two million infants remain completely unvaccinated in our region, and approximately 650,000 do not receive all the recommended vaccines.

Covid-19 also saw progress on immunization stall, resulting in the need for continued catch-up vaccination today. This is evident in the diphtheria and measles outbreaks that have unfortunately started occurring.

World Immunization Week 2025 arrives at a critical juncture. To safeguard this great public health achievement, we need unwavering commitment to reach all children with essential vaccines and to protect people against vaccine-preventable diseases.

The recent changes in donor budgets in global health has put a severe strain on immunization programmes everywhere, and has also affected disease surveillance, laboratory networks and outbreak response capacities.

The confluence of these could lead to tragic outcomes, and we urge national governments to boost their EPI investments to ensure the long-term sustainability of immunization.

We are at a crossroads. The hard-won gains in stamping out vaccine preventable diseases are in jeopardy. We must choose the path of collaborative action, towards hope and health. In walking this path, we must strengthen health systems, address vaccine hesitancy, enhance surveillance, and ensure sustainable financing.

The only way forward is together - governments, health organizations, communities, and individuals – to protect all the progress we've made, and continue toward a world where no one suffers from a disease that could have been prevented by vaccination.

On World Immunization Week, join us in spreading the message that vaccines are safe, vaccines save lives, and immunization for all is essential.

To do this would be to protect humanity’s greatest achievement – vaccines - and protect humanity’s greatest treasure – our children.