NPR: When Countries Get Wealthier, Kids Can Lose Out On Vaccines
“You’d think that as a poor country grows wealthier, more of its children would get vaccinated for preventable diseases such as polio, measles, and pneumonia. But a review published in Nature this month offers a different perspective. ‘The countries that are really poor get a lot of support for the vaccinations. The countries that are really rich can afford to pay for the vaccines anyway,’ says Beate Kampmann, director of the Vaccine Centre at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and author of the review. But, she says, ‘the middle-income countries are in a tricky situation because they don’t qualify for support, yet they don’t necessarily have the financial resources and stability to purchase the vaccines’…” (Huang, 11/12).