Topic: 2025 – Vaccine Access and Distribution
Country: Bolivia
Delegate Name: Madelyn Tolsma
In 2025 our most efficient tool for disease prevention is Vaccines, currently there are vaccines to prevent more than 20 life-threatening diseases, and they save an estimated 4 million lives each year according to the world health organization. Across the world there have been immense advancements on the research and development of vaccines. The problem lies in the lack of access many people have to these vaccinations. Lower income countries face this issue to the highest degree. Inconsistent supply chains and a lack of qualified professionals to deliver vaccines pose great threats to these countries’ ability to provide their peoples with sufficient vaccines. In addition, in many low- and middle-income countries, there has been a much larger increase in vaccine initiation compared to vaccination completion, so some children are only partially vaccinated. Children who are only partially vaccinated do not have the optimum immune benefit of the vaccinations, so studies increasingly focus on predictors of completed vaccination. With the recent COVID-19 pandemic these problems pose a clear threat to a healthier, safer world. Millions go unvaccinated each year; many countries have not seen progress and some others have even gone back on it.
Bolivia’s citizens currently are not properly immunized. Take for example the BCG vaccine, the global average for vaccinated individuals is 88% while in Bolivia it’s only 68%, similar trends occur in just about every common vaccine. Within Bolivia there’s also systems amplifying inequitable distribution. La Paz is the department in Bolivia that faces the largest of disparities. The main cause of these disparities is not access but stigma around vaccines. Although there was a consistent uptick in people accessing vaccines before 2010, the following years it has gone down around 14%. This is due to citizens’ mistrust of vaccinations, a trend occurring throughout Latin America and the Caribbean since the 2010s, which was only heightened by 2019. Parents began to postpone bringing their children to health centers for routine vaccination. To counteract this Bolivia has passed laws in which you must have proof of a Covid 19 vaccine to benefit from government programs i.e enrolling in a new public school. This initiative received a lot of push back; it also overcrowded Bolivia’s vaccination centers and put Bolivia into a further budget deficit.
Bolivia stands with the world health organizations’ plan to grant more equitable global access to vaccines and response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It also promotes Mandated Vaccines as a means to fight against stigma.
Works Cited: UNIEFC USA, https://www.unicefusa.org/stories/bolivia-vaccination-brigades-make-house-calls-reach-every-child
World Health Organization Immunization Dashboard (Bolivia), 2024, https://immunizationdata.who.int/dashboard/regions/region-of-the-americas/BOL
World Health Organization Immunization Dashboard, 2024, https://immunizationdata.who.int
Lessons From The Bolivian Vaccine Mandate, 2023, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9997729/
