Pakistan, June 26 -- New research has confirmed what Pakistan's public health sector has long feared: childhood immunisation, once a rare success story in a fragile system, is now in retreat. Globally, vaccination rates have stalled, with 15.7 million children receiving no routine vaccines in 2023. But Pakistan's ranking stands out for all the wrong reasons: it now has the second-highest number of zero-dose children in South Asia, behind only India.

That figure-419,000 children left entirely unprotected from routine diseases-represents a collapse in state outreach, a growing trust deficit, and the gradual unravelling of decades of immunisation progress. Worse, it places millions of other children at risk of preventable outbreaks as disea...