Improving vaccine equity – Addressing barriers and building capacity to improve equitable vaccine uptake across the EU

EuroHealthNet have launched a Policy Précis “Improving vaccine equity: Addressing barriers and building capacity to improve vaccine uptake.”

• The problem: Not everyone has equal access to vaccines and reliable vaccine information.
• Why it matters: Suboptimal vaccination coverage leads to preventable illness and death, and increases health inequalities.
• The way forward: A combination of local, national and international actions will help address determinants of unequal access and improve vaccine communication.

This Policy Précis outlines how suboptimal vaccine coverage is due to many factors, including social determinants and health system barriers. Such factors affect lower income communities, as well as ethnic, religious or cultural minorities across Europe, more. They include structural barriers, such as the geographical distance to healthcare centres, limited service hours, and administrative barriers related to required documentation. While addressing global vaccine inequalities requires important structural and political solutions at the highest level (such as the proposed WHO ‘pandemic treaty’), addressing many of the vaccine inequalities within European countries requires ‘local solutions to local challenges’.