Cobertura vacinal em menores de cinco anos em alagoas: análise entre os anos 2013 a 2021

Abstract

Vaccines are one of the most important achievements in public health, as they are safe, effective and contribute to reducing child morbidity and the costs arising from these diseases. Despite this great scientific discovery, anti-vaccination movements emerged and many struggles and questions were fought throughout history. As a result, one of the most importante repercussions that these movements caused was vaccine hesitancy and, consequently, the reduction of vaccine coverage, especially for children. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the child vaccination coverage of children under five years old in the State of Alagoas in the last 9 years, making a comparison with the child vaccination coverage in Brazil. The interest in this theme arose when realizing the need for a deeper understanding and explanation for citizens about immunization, since it is a good of the people, and for the people and guarantees benefits to collective health. This is a descriptive epidemiological study with na ecological design, data were collected on the website of the Department of Informatics of the Unified Health System. The age group addressed was from zero to four years 11 months and 29 days and data collection on vaccination coverage was carried out from 2013 to 2021, since the year 2022 still does not present the complete quantitative. This study was not submitted to the Research Ethics Committee, as data were extracted from a public domain platform. In the results, it was found that of the 16 vaccines that need to be applied to children under five years old, only two had an increase in vaccination coverage in 2021, among them: yellow fever, which had an increase of 78.20% when compared to 2020 and the viral tetra that showed an increase of 35.04%. Even so, both in Brazil and in Alagoas, no immunobiological has reached the percentage recommended by the Ministry of Health, despite the country having evolved in recent years in this area with the creation of the National Immunization Program. However, this should not reflect on childhood vaccination coverage, as vaccination is a respected, protected and guaranteed right for Brazilian children. However, it can be assumed that this drop in vaccination coverage is a consequence of the influence of the infodemic on vaccination, which spread myths on social networks and limited true information, contributing to vaccine hesitancy, which was listed as one of the biggest health problems global. Finally, the information in this study allows us to affirm the real urgency of vaccination coverage, which showed a significant reduction in the percentage of immunobiologicals both in Alagoas and in Brazil. This result is worrying, as the country runs the risk of seeing the diseases that were under control return, since it failed to reach the immunization targets.