The Big Catch-Up

The Big Catch-up is a global childhood immunization recovery effort announced on 24 April 2023 by the World Health Organization, UNICEF and Gavi the Vaccine Alliance together with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other partners, launched under the Immunization Agenda 2030 framework. It responds to vaccination coverage declines recorded in more than one hundred countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, when overburdened health services, closed clinics and disrupted vaccine supply chains left more than twenty five million children under-vaccinated in 2021 alone, with over twenty focus countries, including Nigeria, India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia, home to three quarters of the world's unvaccinated children. The initiative aims to restore and exceed pre-pandemic immunization rates, strengthen primary health care for essential immunization, and expand HPV vaccination among adolescents in low and middle income countries, and had delivered more than one hundred million vaccine doses to an estimated 18.3 million children across thirty six countries.