Millions at risk as coronavirus disrupts immunisation campaigns: UN

ABUJA: Millions of people, including in Africa’s most populous country Nigeria, risk contracting diseases such as polio and measles as the coronavirus pandemic has halted vaccination campaigns, the UN said on Wednesday.

Additional financial resources are needed to safely resume vaccinations, the UN childrens’ agency Unicef and the World Health Organisation said in a joint statement. "We cannot allow the fight against one deadly disease to cause us to lose ground in the fight against other diseases," said Unicef executive director Henrietta Fore.

"Addressing the global Covid-19 pandemic is critical. However, other deadly diseases also threaten the lives of millions of children in some of the poorest areas of the world," she added in a joint statement wuth WHO. While Nigeria, home to 200 million people, eradicated wild polio in August, it remains at risk of vaccine-derived polio.

Measles is among the leading cause of death and disability in children in the country, where 54 percent have only received one vaccine dose, according to the 2018 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey.

On Monday, authorities said they were battling a suspected outbreak of yellow fever in two southern states, Delta and Enugu, that left more than 70 dead according to local media. In neighbouring Benue state, more than a dozen unexplained deaths have been reported in recent days.

The percentage of people immunised against yellow fever remains low in many parts of Africa, even though the vaccine is nearly 100 percent effective. Coronavirus has claimed 1,160 lives and infected 64,336 in Nigeria but these numbers are thought to be conservative due to a lack of testing.

International health bodies are now calling for immunisations to fully resume worldwide in order to protect lives. "Unlike with Covid, we have the tools and knowledge to stop diseases such as polio and measles," said WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

"What we need are the resources and commitments to put these tools and knowledge into action. If we do that, children’s lives will be saved," he said. In Nigeria, immunisations for measles and polio are available at all government health centres, according to Peter Hawkins, Unicef Nigeria Country Representative.

"All caregivers and parents need to ensure that their children are fully vaccinated and protected from childhood killer diseases," he said, "including ensuring that all doses are taken, so that the vaccine can be effective."

Meanwhile, first vaccinations in the European Union against Covid-19 could happen in the first three months of 2021 under an optimistic scenario, the EU health agency chief told AFP on Wednesday.

"I think optimistically first quarter next year, but I can’t be more precise," Andrea Ammon, the director of the Stockholm-based European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), said in an interview. A European source told AFP on Tuesday that a vaccine could be authorised for use in the EU in "early 2021", after the announcement that US pharmaceutical group Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech’s vaccine had shown 90 percent effectiveness in phase three trials.

"Of course it’s promising," said Ammon, stressing that so far it is a "press release and not yet a (scientific) peer review, so we have to see what the final assessment will be." For any vaccine to be available within the European Union, it has to receive authorisation from the European Medicines Agency.

The European Commission said on Wednesday it had signed a contract with Pfizer and BioNTech to buy 300 million doses of their vaccine. Ammon said the pandemic’s spread in Europe was "very, very concerning" and all indicators were "going in the wrong direction right now."

Since the beginning of the outbreak, Europe has suffered at least 311,000 deaths from more than 13 million infections, and many countries have been hit by a second wave. Ammon suggested "it could be that it takes longer to bring the cases down from where we are right now" than it did in March and April when cases peaked during the first wave in Europe.

She urged Europeans to respect their countries’ restrictions and measures to curb the spread of the virus, "as hard as it may be".

"They have to understand that it’s very crucial that they are contributing to the success of the control of the epidemic by complying with these measures." EU Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides reiterated on Wednesday that a vaccine would not put an immediate end to the pandemic.

"We need to understand that even when we have a safe and effective vaccine this will not be a silver bullet that will make Covid-19 disappear overnight," she told reporters. "Even when a safe and effective vaccine is ... available there will be a need to continue with these measures until we’re able to reach a significant part of the population," she said.