U.N. News Centre: World’s largest, fastest vaccine rollout targets polio’s ‘final strongholds’ — U.N. initiative
“In a massive undertaking aimed at stamping out polio once and for all — dubbed ‘the switch’ — a United Nations-backed eradication initiative will next week begin the largest and fastest globally coordinated rollout of a vaccine into routine immunization programs in history. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) announced [Thursday] that between 17 April and 1 May, 155 countries and territories around the world will stop using the trivalent oral polio vaccine (tOPV), which protects against all three strains of wild poliovirus, and replace it with bivalent OPV (bOPV), which protects against the remaining two wild polio strains, types 1 and 3…” (4/14).