Children Vaccination as a Population Strategy to Increase COVID-19 Vaccine …

Guimarães RM. Children vaccination as a population strategy to increase COVID-19 vaccine coverage in Brazil. Lancet Reg Health Am. 2022;8:100240. doi:10.1016/j.lana.2022.100240.

Throughout the history of public health, vaccines have been one of the most effective and efficient strategies for controlling infectious diseases.1 Vaccination against COVID-19 started in Brazil on January 17th, 2021.2 It happened late if compared to the rest of the world. Conversely, the country has been gradually expanding coverage, at levels higher than even developed countries, such as Germany and France.3 As of the beginning of March 2022, Brazil has immunized 80.2% of its population with one dose. Regarding complete immunization (2 doses applied or single dose), the country covered 72.0% of all population. In addition, Brazil got 28.5% of booster coverage.4

Brazil faced different vaccination phases, with varying growth rates of coverage curve. In particular, the first dose coverage curve demonstrates the saturation of the vaccination strategy in the general population. In Brazil, it remained stagnant since September 20th, 2021. At that point, the vaccination’s first dose coverage level was 66.7%. Since then, deceleration has been the hallmark of this new phase, for which we obtained the velocity from the segmented regression analysis (Figure 1 a). On January 13th, 2022, the first dose vaccination reached 75.9% after 16 weeks of a prolonged increase.

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