[The Conversation Africa] The concentrated global effort to use vaccination as a public health intervention began in 1974. Since then, vaccination has changed our lives. Worldwide, in the decades 2000-2020, childhood vaccination led to the reduction of deaths in children under 5 by 50% to 5.4 million deaths per year. Vaccination currently averts more than 5 million deaths each year worldwide. These are deaths that would have been caused by measles, whooping cough, tetanus, polio, diphtheria, pneumonia, rotavirus diarrhoea, and othe