Australia’s childhood vaccination rates declining

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Australia's childhood vaccination rates have plummeted, and experts are calling for urgent action to encourage more parents to get their children immunised.

Transcript

00:00So we've been monitoring our vaccination rates for a long time now and so our latest

00:08report on the 2024 coverage rates has just come out.

00:13So it's a concern because before the pandemic, coverage rates in children were steadily increasing

00:22for the previous seven to eight years but since the COVID-19 pandemic, they've been

00:28gradually trending down, so year on year, so four years in a row they've dropped, it's

00:34not made by a huge amount, so we're talking about two to three percent decrease over four

00:41years and they're still around the sort of low 90 percent rate.

00:47The level of immunity you need in the population to prevent disease varies depending on the

00:55disease.

00:56So we, in Australia, we have a aspirational national target for childhood vaccination

01:03coverage of 95 percent, so that's mainly set on the basis of measles, which is the most

01:11infectious transmissible disease.

01:15So certainly we want to have the vaccine coverage rate up as close to 95 percent as possible and

01:24it was before the pandemic, but it is trending down, which does increase the risk of people

01:31catching measles.

01:32However, it's important to note that when you look about herd immunity or herd protection,

01:40that you're looking at the whole population.

01:42So these are just young children coming through who are certainly at increased risk of severe

01:49measles.

01:50that there's still the rest of the population who had higher rates of vaccine coverage.

01:57that is this much better.

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