Understanding and improving vaccination coverage is critically important to achieving the goals of the Gates Foundation and ensuring that children have a healthier future.

Today, the most common way to measure immunization coverage is the administrative method – doses administered divided by the estimated target population.  Above and beyond that, periodic in-person surveys among 12-23 month old children are conducted. The pitfalls of each of these survey methods is that they rely on obtaining data from vaccination cards kept by parents at home or from parental recall if cards are not available. Not surprisingly, this is prone to error and survey coverage estimates vary, sometimes significantly. Even less common is the use of sero-surveys in which toddlers have a small amount of blood drawn for measurement of certain antibodies.  But this is very labor-intensive and costly, and therefore, is not done very often. 

 So what is the point of understanding immunization coverage?

Measuring immunity gives us an understanding of who has not received certain vaccines and how much of the population is protected which helps us target immunization efforts at those we have missed and improves overall immunity against disease.

That is why we are now accepting Letters of Inquiry for the development of an inexpensive “immunity assessment tool.” This could be a mouth swab, a finger prick or any other method that is quick and easy to administer and gives rapid results on a child’s immunity status.  The development of this immunity assessment tool would be game changing.

On our last trip to the India, we saw first-hand how a tool like this could improve the way immunity is measured.

We traveled to rural Bihar in Northern India and met one mother for whom it was difficult to recall if her child had been vaccinated during the last immunization round. In fact, it was difficult to determine if children in the community generally were getting their needed vaccines.

In rural Bihar, there is very little infrastructure – roads are rarely paved, families may live long distances from clinics or hospitals, and while community health workers often support mothers to obtain the right vaccinations for their children while children are very young, tracking whether children have received their needed vaccinations remains a difficult task.  If we don’t know which children we are missing, it is very hard for us to develop solutions to better reach these children.

An immunity assessment tool that is inexpensive, quick and easy would mean that we could be smarter in our approach to targeting immunization efforts and ensure that the vaccines we do have reach they children who need them most. It would help us to achieve the goal of protecting all children from vaccine-preventable diseases. 

To us, the act of vaccinating a child is the ultimate expression of love – despite their short-lived discomfort. It means that they can live without fear of life-threatening diseases and set them on the right path for a healthy future.

For more information on this grant opportunity, please see our grants page.