When is the last time you contacted your member of Congress, whether through email, phone or in person?
It may seem intimidating, but the truth is they work for us. In February, I visited my congressional offices in Washington, D.C., to discuss the importance of global childhood immunization.
Supporting global health programs for low-income countries is vital because, as we learned from the pandemic, diseases can easily travel from nation to nation. While I was expecting the offices to be too busy to pay much attention, I was pleasantly surprised to see how open they were to listening to our stories and hearing our voices.
It’s time to continue using our voices for what we care most about. World Immunization Week, during the last week of April, served as an important reminder: Over the course of the pandemic, 67 million children worldwide missed out on routine immunizations, which was a major setback to the progress we had been making vaccinating the world’s children.
We need to continue funding immunization programs to battle deadly infectious diseases such as measles and pneumonia. An investment in childhood immunization is an investment in the security of U.S. and world health. To prevent and respond to emerging infectious disease outbreaks, we must ensure that countries have healthy populations and robust health systems.
Contact your congressional representatives and remind them of the importance of funding global immunization programs. Your advocacy matters and is powerful in making change.
The writer is a graduate student at UNLV and volunteer for Shot at Life, a United Nations Foundation campaign dedicated to funding global childhood immunization.