Gates Package — page 1088

more than 27 17 thanks to major investments in its vaccines ran in the single digits. Building on the systems that had been put in place for smallpox, the government set out to raise immunization rates by an order of magnitude. It succeeded wildly: Vaccination rates soared, and case numbers plummeted. In 2000, for example, the country reported more than 38,000 cases of measles, and twenty years later, it reported fewer than 6,000.16 Every year, India's immunization program gives primary doses to more than 27 million newborns, and booster doses to more than 100 million children between the ages of one and five years. <~?~Insert art 037_Gate_9780593534489_art_r1> Stamping out measles in India. Cases of measles plummeted in India as vaccination rates soared. The first vaccine dose (MCV1) was introduced in India in the mid-1980s, with a second dose (MCV2) being recommended later. (WHO) Building up a strong immunization program was a fantastic investment for India long before COVID came along, and when the virus did arrive, the investment paid off again. Because it had a system already in place, India rapidly established nearly 348,000 public centers and over 28,000 private centers to administer COVID-19 vaccines--including many in the tough mountain regions in the country's north and northeast. By mid-October 2021, the country had administered one billion doses of COVID vaccines. India still had work to do--only about 50 percent of the population there had received at least one dose--but there is simply no way they could have achieved as much as they did, as quickly as they did, without a well-run immunization program already in place. One of India's next-door neighbors has a similar story. Pakistan's vaccine coverage numbers have gone up dramatically in the past few decades,17 thanks to major investments in its health system. And as soon as COVID vaccines became available, the government was ready to