Facts 1. In the past 60 years, vaccines have helped eradicate one disease (smallpox) and are close to eradicating another (polio). 2. Vaccines currently help prevent more than 2.5 million deaths each year. 3. The impact of child vaccines is magnified when used in conjunction with other health efforts, including with things such as antibiotics, oral rehydration salts, bed nets, and vitamins. 4. New and underutilized vaccines could avert nearly 4 million child deaths under the age of 5 by 2015. 5. Vaccines cause “herd immunity”—if a majority of people in a community have been vaccinated against a disease, an unvaccinated person is less likely to get sick because others are less likely to get sick from and spread that disease. 6. Vaccines helped reduce measles deaths globally by 78% between 2000 and 2008; in sub-Saharan Africa, deaths dropped by 92% in the same period. 7. Vaccines exist that could stop rotavirus and pneumonia, two problems that kill nearly 3 million children under 5 each year. 8. New or improved vaccines are currently being developed for HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and neglected tropical diseases. Researchers estimate that a viable malaria vaccine could be ready for children in the developing world as early as 2015. 9. Not all vaccines are given as shots; vaccines for rotavirus and polio, for instance, are given orally. 10. The GAVI Alliance has supported the immunization of more than 288 million children and as a result averted more than 5 million child deaths since 2000. 11. Thanks to vaccines, most diseases prevented by vaccines are no longer common in the United States. According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, even the few cases we have in the US could very quickly become tens or hundreds of thousands of cases if vaccines were no longer used.
Non-Efficacy
* FACT : In the