Childhood Vaccinations Committee

22 June 2026

Contents updated on 22 Jun 2026

The Chair opens the first WHO evidence session on childhood vaccination in England, while Dr Pastore outlines pre‑ and post‑Covid coverage trends, prospects for recovery, key drivers in lower‑income countries, UK performance against WHO targets, and available international data resources.

Committee Mon, 22 Jun 2026 House of Lords

00:03 - 01:26

Speaker 6

Welcome to today's meeting. This is the 15th oral evidence session as part of the committee's inquiry into childhood vaccination rates in England. Many thanks to Dr. Roberta Pastore for attending as our witness today. The session's open to the public, it's broadcast live, and will subsequently be accessible via the parliamentary website. A verbatim transcript will be taken of the evidence and will be published on the parliamentary website.

A few days after the session, our witness will be sent a copy of the transcript to check it for accuracy, and it would be very helpful if you could advise us of any correction as quickly as possible, Dr. Pastore, and then we can put it on the internet. If after this evidence session you wish to clarify or amplify any points you made during your evidence, or have any additional points to make, you're very welcome to submit supplementary written evidence to us. So let's start with the first question, and it is this: what are the international trends in childhood vaccination uptake in recent years, and what disparities exist, both in countries comparable to England and globally? And how might these trends develop into the future? Dr. Pastore.

01:26 - 03:51

Speaker 3

Yes, so first of all, thank you for having the opportunity to participate in this in this session. My name is Roberta Pastore, I'm a medical doctor by training, and I work in the WHO, in the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe, and I work in the immunization unit as a team lead for immunization programme strengthening. So to reply to your question, I will refer mostly to the trends in the European region, which are more familiar with, but the trends are similar globally. So we take as a as a starting point to monitor the trends the 2019 year, because it's the year before the COVID pandemic that brought a lot of disruption in the immunization programmes worldwide, and in most of the countries there was evidence of a backsliding in the immunization coverage for several vaccines. And in the European region, we can see that the recovery from this backsliding that was observed in 2020, 2021, has really not happened homogeneously across the countries in the region.

And the region as a whole, it includes 53 countries, and we have registered a recovery in mostly a third, a full recovery in mostly a third of the countries. If we take only the high-income countries, we can see a similar trends to the middle-income countries, but less acute. I will focus on the high-income countries now, because they are more comparable to to England and probably more interesting for the scope of of this session. So I'll just consult some some data. So overall, if we compare the coverage level in 2019 with the coverage level in 2024, we can see that 22 countries over 36 high-income countries in the region had a decline in coverage.

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