For Every Generation, Vaccines Work — But Only If We Show Up

Sylvester Ojenagbon

Let me start with a confession. I used to be the parent who gripped my child’s hand too tightly at the clinic and felt my stomach drop. This was not because of the needle but because of the stories. The whispers and warnings, the doubts about something unnatural entering a healthy body through a vaccine, unsettled me far more than the procedure itself.

I have learned that fear has a geography. In Nigeria, it is vast and varied. It exists in Makoko’s alleys, where a mother cannot miss a day of fish trading for the clinic. It lives in dusty Borno, where a young father’s trust in government is broken after seeing more violence than medicine. It is even found in air-conditioned Lagos living rooms, where educated couples debate the ethics of the HPV vaccine over snacks and drinks.

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This is the landscape of World Immunisation Week, which is observed this year from April 24 to April 30. The global theme is “For every generation, vaccines work”. That phrase is not a slogan you paste on a banner and forget. It is a quiet declaration that the same needle that protected your grandfather from smallpox protects your newborn from rotavirus. It serves as a reminder that immunity does not go out of style or retire. It passes from arm to arm, from decade to decade, like a torch that must never drop.

Now, let me give you a figure that should unsettle you. The World Health Organisation estimates that one in five Nigerian children still misses out on routine immunisation. That is not a statistic. That is a child in Kaduna who will never see his fifth birthday because of measles. That is a baby girl in Ebonyi who contracts polio just as the country celebrates being polio‑free.

The truth is that we have done magnificent things. Wild poliovirus eradication was celebrated in Nigeria in 2020, a feat that required community volunteers to walk for days to reach settlements without roads. But eradicating a virus is not the same as keeping it gone. Keeping it gone requires that no child, not one, is left outside the protective ring of a vaccine. This is because vaccines work, but only if we work with them.

This is where personal responsibility comes in, and I want to be careful here. Personal responsibility does not mean blaming a tired mother who walks two hours to a clinic only to find the vaccines have run out. It means recognising that immunisation is one of the rare public health tools where your individual action directly protects someone else. The theme says “for every generation”, but generations do not act. People act.

When you ensure your child receives the BCG vaccine for tuberculosis, the pentavalent vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis B and Hib, the oral polio vaccine, the measles vaccine, and now the new malaria vaccine being rolled out in selected Nigerian states, you are not just protecting your own family. You are lowering the viral load in your entire community. You are making the playground safe for the child whose chemotherapy means he cannot be vaccinated. You are protecting the pregnant woman who lives some doors down. You are proving that vaccines work, not as a theory, but as a lived fact. And doctors call this herd immunity, but I call it being a good neighbour.

We cannot, however, discuss responsibility without also talking about access. The federal government, through the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, has worked to expand the electronic routine immunisation tracking system called e‑Tracker, which now reaches over 12,000 health facilities. The Gavi Alliance has committed new funding for vaccine cold chain equipment in rural areas because a vaccine that gets warm is a vial of false hope. Even the private sector has stepped in, with telecom companies sending free reminders to parents whose phones are registered in catchment zones. These are not small victories. They are the scaffolding that makes personal responsibility a reality.

Yet on the ground, the real work remains human. I think of the community health extension worker in a rural area who has not missed a single monthly outreach in eleven years. She rides a red motorcycle with a cooler box strapped to the back, and she says her toughest job is not the long roads or the heat. It is the conversation. It is sitting on a plastic chair in a compound, listening to a grandmother describe the rumour she heard on the radio about vaccines causing infertility. The extension worker does not argue. She tells stories. She points to her own three children, all vaccinated and healthy. She shows the yellow card with the dates.

This is the heart of World Immunisation Week 2026 in Nigeria. It is not a government campaign. It is not a celebrity endorsement or a tweet with a hashtag. It is that moment when a decision is made in a room with no cameras. A father reads the pamphlets his daughter brought home from school and decides to finally take the family to the health centre. A young woman getting married asks her fiancé whether they will vaccinate their future children, and the question is not awkward but necessary. A teacher notices that three children in her class have never received the rotavirus vaccine and speaks to their parents with gentleness instead of judgement. Each of them is answering the theme with their feet: for every generation, vaccines work, but only if each generation shows up.

Now, if you are reading this and you are a parent or guardian, I ask you to do one specific thing this week. Find your child’s immunisation card. Not the digital record, the actual card with the stamps. Look at the dates. If the measles second dose is not ticked, or the yellow fever vaccine, or the meningitis A vaccine, hurry to your nearest primary health centre. Not next week. Tomorrow.

If you are not a parent, ask yourself whether you know a child in your extended family, mosque, or church whose vaccinations have not been completed. Offer to walk with them to the clinic. That is not meddling. That is love in action, and it is how you make a global theme local and real.

We are undoubtedly tired in Nigeria. We are tired from inflation, from insecurity, from the grinding effort of ordinary survival. I know that asking a person to add “check immunisation status” to their list of worries can feel like one burden too many. However, here is the truth the needles carry: a vaccine is one of the few things in this world that gives you back more than it takes. You give a few minutes of a child’s tears or a pinch in the thigh. You get the rest of their life. You give the effort of one trip to the clinic. You get a country where a child can walk to school without the invisible threat of a virus that should have been a footnote in history. That is what “for every generation” actually means. It means your grandparents, your parents, you, your children, and their children. It is an unbroken line of protection.

Although World Immunisation Week ends this Thursday, the promise does not. It lives in the cold chain, in the community health worker’s cooler box, in the tired mother’s memory of a child she lost, and in the choice you make when no one is watching. Choose immunisation. Choose to be the generation that proves this year’s theme true.

Ojenagbon, a health communication expert and certified management trainer, lives in Lagos.

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