CHILDREN have been dying and resources wasted because for decades the World
Health Organization has accepted information about vaccination coverage that’s
often unreliable and sometimes wildly wrong.
Occasionally vaccinations are recorded more than once, says Anthony Burton of
the vaccines division of the WHO in Geneva. “If your data are over-reported, you
may not be paying attention to a problem area and kids who normally would have
got vaccinated will get a disease and die,” he says.
Burton and his colleagues at WHO and UNICEF analysed vaccination data for the
past 20 years. “We discovered that 25 per cent of…
