World Immunization Week
HRH Princess Lamia Bint Majed AlSaud
April 2019
World Immunization Week 2019 gives us an important moment to celebrate and raise awareness of the amazing impact of vaccines and their ability to save millions of lives every year. This year, Alwaleed Philanthropies is joining WIW’s celebration of ‘Vaccine Heroes’, the men and women around the world who strive every day to ensure that their communities are safer and healthier because of vaccinations. Yet, as we celebrate, the global health community is also facing old and new challenges in the fight against preventable diseases. We need to ask what new things governments, the third sector and society can do to promote and enable greater vaccine uptake. Enduring heroes, enduring challenges Alwaleed Philanthropies has long supported the battle against disease and in 2017 we provided a $50 million grant to UNICEF’s Measles & Rubella Initiative to facilitate its work to vaccinate more than fiftyone million children in fourteen countries. The initiative has led me to develop a deep admiration for these ‘Vaccine Heroes’, the people fighting measles and rubella every day. Their determination to overcome enduring barriers to immunization is built on two priorities: awareness and access. I saw these heroes’ efforts first hand when visiting one of UNICEF’s measles-rubella immunization initiatives in the Bankok Sengsuliya village in Laos. They are the health workers who travel by boat, motorbike and foot to reach children in some of the hardest-to-reach places in the world, the parents who fight unrelentingly for their children to be vaccinated and the local groups such as the Laos Women’s Union who work year-round to educate parents about the importance of measles vaccinations in more than 10,000 villages. Together these groups create a web of support, equipping each other to tackle disease head-on. I’m proud to have helped empower them through our partnership with UNICEF, and because we’ve not solved the challenges related to vaccine access, call on other philanthropies and companies to join us in this effort. New challenges, new heroes? Despite the increasing availability of vaccines around the world, almost 20 million children remain unprotected and diseases like measles continue to spread. We have seen preventable diseases threaten the lives of not only the world’s most vulnerable populations, but also increasingly children in wealthy countries with superb access to healthcare like the United States, Japan and Ukraine. This is a new challenge. While it does not compare to the millions of people in the developing world who need vaccinations, it endangers thousands of children who are exposed to diseases like measles and rubella that know no boundaries, geographical, social or economic. As we celebrate this year, we must therefore ask how can we also protect these communities? The need is urgent. The answer is not simple. ‘Vaccine hesitancy’ is on the rise and is fueled by the same concerns affecting parents who chose to vaccinate: the desire to protect the health of their children. When I was a parent of very young children, this was also my primary concern. Before I made any decision about their health and wellbeing, I consulted widely. I wanted to make sure I was informed of the facts. But parents are now bombarded with more information than ever, some of it based on science and unfortunately some of it not. The process of decision making can be overwhelming. Yet the facts remain: vaccines work, and the science proving so is without question. Vaccinations have saved almost a million lives a year for the past two decades. To continue our progress, we need new heroes, both at the highest level of government, the corporate world charities, as well as at the grassroots level. We must all bear a responsibility to share the facts about the power of vaccines in our day to day lives. We can all be ‘vaccine heroes’. Let’s join together to work for a world where preventable diseases are indeed prevented.
