Fewer children die, more children get vaccinated: the 2025 numbers

In 2024, the global mortality rate for children under five fell to 37.4 deaths per 1,000 live births, less than half the level recorded in 2000. This is confirmed by the “Levels & Trends in Child Mortality 2025” report from the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, the UN inter-agency group that has been collecting and harmonizing national data on births and child deaths since 2004.

Alongside this is a second figure, relating to 2025: children who have never received any vaccination — the category defined as “zero-dose” — fell to 13.5 million worldwide, 750,000 fewer than the previous year. 90% of newborns received at least one dose of the DTP vaccine (diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis) and 85% completed the three-dose cycle, one percentage point more than in 2024. The data comes from the joint WUENIC 2026 estimates, produced annually by WHO and UNICEF by cross-referencing national administrative records and population sample surveys.

Those benefiting from these two trends are, in both cases, the world’s child population, with effects concentrated in low- and middle-income countries where preventable mortality remains highest: it is there that decades of low-cost health interventions — vaccinations, oral rehydration therapies, birth assistance — have produced the sharpest decline. The recovery in vaccine coverage in 2025 particularly concerns countries that had suffered the steepest collapse during the COVID-19 pandemic, when routine immunization campaigns were interrupted or slowed on a large scale.

Regarding limitations: both reports note a slowdown in the pace of progress compared to previous decades. The UN IGME report on child mortality is based on modeled estimates drawn from national data of varying quality, while the WUENIC estimates depend on the reliability of local health surveillance systems, which are more robust in some countries than in others. Neither report is produced by the pharmaceutical companies or governments that directly benefit from the results: they are analyses by UN technical agencies based on aggregated, published data that can be verified by third parties.

The overall picture remains one of long-term progress — child mortality more than halved in a quarter century — accompanied by more recent and more fragile signs of recovery in vaccine coverage, following the disruption caused by the pandemic.