Background: Childhood vaccination coverage has increased throughout Europe in recent decades. However, challenges persist in many areas within the European Union (EU), resulting in declining coverage rates in many countries in the period between 2010 and 2021. This general trend requires increased efforts to combat barriers around vaccination uptake. Thus, this article aims to summarise key learnings and trends in paediatric vaccination within the EU, with a focus on current challenges and enablers.
Methods: Methodology is based on analysis of primary data, mainly vaccination coverage rates, as well as review and analysis of the select relevant literature, including peer-reviewed articles, academic research papers, official reports, policies, and other publicly available sources.
Results: For all vaccines assessed (DTP 1st dose, DTP 3rd dose, Hib3, HepB3, measles 1st dose, measles 2nd dose, and polio 3rd dose), a high degree of variation and fluctuation in coverage can be observed. There is a general trend of declining coverage in 2019 compared to 2010, with lower performing countries, such as Romania and Austria, showing increasingly severe coverage fluctuations between the years examined across the analysed vaccines.
Conclusions: Evidence suggests that increasing both accessibility and information regarding vaccines are key enablers to vaccination uptake. Moreover, given the current challenges the EU is facing, crisis preparedness plans are pertinent to ensure immunity gaps do not further exacerbate the disruption of vaccination systems.
Keywords: COVID-19; Ukraine crisis; misinformation; vaccination coverage; vaccine accessibility; vaccine hesitancy; vaccine uptake.