Two doses of vaccine are required for it to be fully effective Owen Humphreys/PA Wire

An estimated 169 million children worldwide have missed out on getting the first dose of a measles vaccine, according to an analysis by the children’s charity Unicef. This includes nearly 2.6 million children in the US, 608,000 children in France, and more than half a million children in the UK.

The study analysed global data from 2010 to 2017, and found that an average of 21.2 million children are missing their first dose of vaccine every year.

Children need two doses of the MMR vaccine for protection. An estimated 110,000 people – most of them children – are thought to have died from measles in 2017, a 22 per cent increase on the previous year.


In the first three months of 2019, more than 110,000 measles cases were reported worldwide, up almost 300 per cent on the same period the year before.

“The measles virus will always find unvaccinated children,” says Henrietta Fore, of Unicef. “If we are serious about averting the spread of this dangerous but preventable disease, we need to vaccinate every child, in rich and poor countries alike.”

The World Health Organisation recommends that 95 per cent of people need to be vaccinated against measles to achieve herd immunity, which stops the infection spreading through populations.

There is some good news – in 2016 and 2017, uptake of the first dose of the MMR vaccine in five-year-olds in the UK exceeded 95 per cent for the first time. However, uptake of the second dose of MMR in five-year-old children is 88 per cent.

Unicef says low vaccination rates worldwide reflect “lack of access, poor health systems, complacency, and in some cases fear or scepticism about vaccines“.

Read more: Italy bans unvaccinated children from schools after measles outbreaks