FRIDAY HARBOR, Washington — The goal of eradicating polio is within humanity’s reach. “Over a decade ago, we were 99% of the way there. Now we’re 99.99%, but that last .01% is so hard,” said Elizabeth Thrush, U.N. Foundation’s Polio and Immunization Advocacy Senior Officer.
Many different organizations and governments across the globe are working on the eradication of polio. This collaborative effort gets plenty of financial aid and boots-on-the-ground support. However, with all of this support in ridding the world of a virus that has often disproportionately affected those living in impoverished areas, there are still challenges standing in the way of achieving this goal.
In a discussion with The Borgen Project, Thrush provided insights into the costs of delivering polio vaccines across the globe and the challenges in providing vaccines to those in impoverished areas. Before her time with the U.N. Foundation, Thrush worked for Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), “providing support for the countries of the Americas on immunization and surveillance activities for polio and other vaccine-preventable diseases.”
The Costs of Vaccines
When looking at vaccines across the board, they are the most cost-effective public health intervention that has existed globally based on their impact and what individual vaccines cost. Health officials across the world including the Journal of Market Access and Health Policy support this notion. Now when diving into Polio vaccines come in two different categories, oral vaccines and injection vaccines. When looking at the basic cost of the vaccines here is how they break down.
Oral polio vaccines cost $0.16 a dose but can get as low as $0.10 a dose. This is because they are easy to administer and cheap to make, and medical professionals as well as volunteer community members can administer them.
Transitioning to injectable vaccines, their costs increase compared to oral vaccines. “It’s around $2 a dose and a trained health care worker has to give it, which means that the cost for delivery is also higher because it’s going to be more involved in the administration side of it,” said Thrush. This is still quite a reasonable price for something of this level of importance. Because of this, the oral vaccine is typically the polio vaccine of choice as you are able to administer it to many more people, and is the reason we as humans are as far as we are in eradicating polio.
According to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), “In collaboration with national governments, thousands of polio vaccinators, health workers and community mobilizers reach more than 400 million children every year in more than 40 countries with over 1 billion doses of polio vaccines.”
The costs of the vaccines being this low led to administering them successfully but other challenges still exist in solving the puzzle of eradicating polio, many of them existing in impoverished areas.
Challenges of Providing Vaccines in Impoverished Areas
Getting vaccines to all the children in the world is necessary for eradicating polio. Having a vaccine and knowing how to achieve eradication is the first step but getting all those children the vaccine is the problem. This problem can stem from a number of challenges many of which affect those in impoverished areas:
- The broader health system not working
- Inadequate infrastructure for delivering the vaccine to remote areas
- Having to keep the vaccines cold enough to stay effective
- Limiting resources such as funding, staff members and medical supplies.
- Lack of information and awareness in communities can lead to vaccine hesitancy or misconception
- Instability and conflict
- The rise of COVID-19 and various strands which halted delivering of vaccines
Solutions are necessary to combat many of these challenges but the solutions and challenges are unique to the country or even region you are in trying to administer the vaccines.
Poverty and Priorities
When working with those living in poverty, their top priorities are food, shelter and water. The vaccines for diseases do not fall on the same level of priority unless it is directly affecting them. Many times campaigns will occur where health care workers on polio campaigns will carry rice with them and give it to each family whose child gets the vaccine. Now, this does not always work and can create cases where people are bringing kids back multiple times to gain the rewards which are why children get stamps on their pinky fingers indicating they got their dose, Thrush explained.
Another issue that arises is where “vaccines can be a victim of their own success,” said Thursh. Since the vaccine is working effectively and other children are vaccinated that is what is causing the disease to not spread. This was the case in the U.S. as well where people choose not to vaccinate their children with the polio vaccine because they do not see people that the disease affected. All children need to get a vaccine in order for it to be successful.
Commitments from Groups Around the World
In the most recent commitment during the World Health Summit in October 2022, the likes of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF, the U.S., France, Australia, Rotary International and many others donated $2.6 billion to the efforts of eradicating polio. The two countries with endemic wild Polio include Pakistan and Afghanistan.
“Children deserve to live in a polio-free world, but as we have seen this year with painful clarity until we reach every community and vaccinate every child, the threat of polio will persist,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell.
It is with the commitment of people around the world that the eradication of polio is closer than ever.
Looking Ahead
Humanity is on the edge of completing one of the biggest public health goals in the world. GPEI predicts that the current goal of eradicating the wild poliovirus will be by 2026. This is easier said than done with the two remaining endemic countries being Pakistan and Afghanistan. With the resources of the world backing this goal, all who are affected or could be affected by polio will have protection against the hazardous virus.
“No place is safe until polio has been eradicated everywhere. As long as the virus still exists somewhere in the world, it can spread – including in our own country. We now have a realistic chance to eradicate polio completely, and we want to jointly seize that chance,” said Svenja Schulze, Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, Germany.
– Sean McMullen
Photo: Flickr