The Global Alliance for Vaccination (GAVI) said on Monday 11 December that Mozambique is one of the countries with the lowest level of access to vaccination for children, a situation that puts it at risk and increases the exposure rate.
Speaking in Maputo, after a meeting with the Mozambican President, Filipe Nyusi, GAVI’s CEO, David Marlow, explained that the poor levels of access to vaccines put children in danger and that, in order to reverse the situation, the organisation he heads is available to help the Mozambican population improve their health and guarantee a better quality of life.
“Mozambique has one of the highest rates of children with zero doses, i.e. who have never had a single vaccination. We recognise that we have a huge amount of work to do in order to achieve routine immunisation for children,” he said, guaranteeing that GAVI will help the Ministry of Health to solve these problems, not least because there is already an immunisation programme in the country. “We’re going to collaborate in the process of acquiring vaccines and ensuring that they reach everyone.”
The GAVI Alliance is an initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that became a reality in 2000, a time when the distribution of vaccines in the world’s poorest areas had begun to decline, since immunisation rates were stagnant or declining at the end of the 1990s.
