Health Ministry Trashes Unicef’s Report On ‘Zero Dose Children’

Recently Unicef has come up with data revealing that in India there are a high number of zero-dose children as compared to other countries. However, the Union Health Ministry has trashed the report stating that it paints an incomplete picture of the country’s immunisation program. The ministry said the accurate and complete narrative of the government immunisation efforts can be gauged through the comprehensive understanding of the relative data and programmatic interventions done by the government from time to time. The ministry further added that the percentage of coverage for all antigens in India is higher than the global average. In India, the coverage for most antigens is more than 90 percent which is at par with any other high-income countries. Even with India’s coverage of 83 per cent for a pneumococcal conjugate vaccine which falls at the lowest bracket, it is much higher than the 65 percent of the global figures.

Among the countries compared in the study, India is the only country having DTP- 1 (Penta-1 ) coverage above 90 percent and dropout children are 2 percent whereas this gap is much wider in other compared countries. The ministry further stated that the zero-dose children in India account for 0.11 per cent of the country’s total population. This statistic alone shows the unwavering commitment of the government to continuously increase the scope and outreach of the immunisation program of the nation. Also, India provides the maximum number of WHO recommended vaccines under the UIP in comparison to most of the other countries.