Argentina’s childhood vaccination rates: Argentina is facing a sharp and worrying collapse in childhood and adolescent vaccination, with experts warning that diseases once under control could return in force.
A new analysis by the Argentine Paediatric Society (SAP), based on official health ministry data, shows that in 2024, fewer than half of children aged five and six received several of their key recommended vaccines. None of the vaccines studied reached the 95% coverage level typically needed for herd immunity.
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The figures mark a startling reversal for a country long seen as having one of Latin America’s strongest immunisation systems. Vaccine coverage has been slipping since around 2015, but paediatricians say the pace and depth of the decline in the past year is unlike anything they have seen before. They link the current drop to Argentina’s economic crisis and President Javier Milei’s austerity drive, which has cut the national health budget and weakened outreach programmes that once helped keep vaccination rates high.
“The decline is serious. Coverage continues to fall. It has never been this low,” said Dr Alejandra Gaiano, a paediatric infectious disease specialist with the SAP. “The re-emergence of diseases that have been eliminated or controlled is the most serious issue and the greatest concern.”
According to the SAP’s review, only about 46% of five-year-olds received the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella) in 2024, compared with roughly 90% between 2015 and 2019. Coverage for the polio booster at the same age fell from 88% to 47%, and the vaccine that protects against whooping cough, diphtheria and tetanus dropped from 88% to 46%.
Doctors are particularly concerned about the youngest children. The SAP estimates that coverage of the third dose of the pentavalent vaccine and the inactivated polio vaccine, given at six months of age, has fallen by an average of about 10 percentage points compared with pre-pandemic levels. That shortfall could mean that more than 115,000 infants did not receive their basic protection against illnesses such as diphtheria, hepatitis B, polio, and whooping cough.
This erosion of services has coincided with a rise in vaccine hesitancy after the COVID-19 pandemic. Argentina historically had very little organised anti-vaccine activity, but Gaiano said mistrust of Covid vaccines has “spread to other vaccines” and now contributes to the overall decline.
Argentina has reported a large number of hepatitis A cases this year and an increase in measles infections. The country is also facing an outbreak of whooping cough: cases in 2025 are running at about three times the number seen the previous year, and five children have died so far, according to the SAP.