Vaccination rates are slipping around the world. Canada isn’t immune, says new study – CBC
In some countries, the decline is driven by conflict; in others, by vaccine hesitancy
Jun 26, 2025
After decades of progress, childhood vaccination rates have started stalling or falling around the world in recent years, and Canada is not immune to the trend, suggests a new study from The Lancet.
The study estimated the coverage of 11 childhood vaccines in 204 countries and territories between 1980 and 2023, analyzing over 1,000 data sources from around the world.
It found that although globally there were huge strides made in vaccine coverage for children during that period (vaccine coverage against diseases like measles, polio and pertussis more than doubled), progress started stalling, even before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Particularly in the Americas and high-income countries, between 2010 and 2019, measles vaccine coverage declined in about half the countries,” said Dr. Jonathan Mosser, an assistant professor of health metric sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington and one of the co-authors of the study.
