Vietnam National Immunization Program

Vietnam's national childhood vaccination effort, established in 1981 by the Ministry of Health with support from the World Health Organization and UNICEF as the country's Expanded Program on Immunization, originally providing free vaccination to children under one year old against six diseases: diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, poliomyelitis, measles and tuberculosis. The program became one of Vietnam's six national targeted health programs in 1985 and reached 87 percent national coverage by 1987, a rapid rise for a country still recovering from decades of war, and it went on to record two major public health milestones, the elimination of polio in 2000 and of maternal and neonatal tetanus in 2005. Vietnamese health authorities estimate that the program's first three decades of continuous vaccination prevented as many as 5.7 million cases of vaccine-preventable disease and roughly 26,000 deaths nationwide.