Linked Workshop: New Vaccine Introduction in Middle Income Countries – Overcoming Barriers to Introduce and Scale the HPV Vaccine

Following COVID-19, Middle Income Countries (MICs) face increasing challenges to sustain and expand their immunisation programmes: coverage rates of traditional vaccines are backsliding, domestic vaccine financing is growing slowly, and significant inequities in access and service delivery remain . New vaccine introductions are also lagging behind, creating a missed opportunity to save lives, with MICs accounting for 14% of the total vaccine-preventable deaths. Even when these vaccines are available, their access is limited to those able to pay in the private sector, also posing a significant threat to equitable access within and across countries. Therefore, it is critical to support MICs in their decision making process to introduce and expand the coverage of new vaccines and save lives.

In July 2023, Linked held an in-person workshop where participants from Mongolia, Philippines, Tunisia, and Vietnam exchanged their country experiences related to barriers, lessons learned, and strategies to introduce and scale-up the HPV vaccine, identified key steps and drivers of successful HPV vaccine introduction, in particular developing strong stakeholder coordination and engagement, shared demand generation approaches and tools to build trust, acceptance, and uptake of the vaccine in communities, with special attention to religious and cultural contexts, and identified introduction and service delivery strategies, and their tradeoffs and implications for sustainable financing to support countries’ decision making.