Vaccines are great. We hope we can all agree on that. If not, please take a look at this Global Citizen post from January. If you’re still not convinced, you can stop reading now. Just kidding, please don’t.

We’re here to win you over.

Since talking about something repeatedly can oftentimes take the life out of a topic (and in case you didn’t notice we talk about vaccines a lot on GC), we wanted to share some tidbits from global health experts to hopefully inspire you. The professionals below took part in a Shot@Life panel just last month. Shot@Life is a worldwide vaccination campaign by the United Nations Foundation. You can watch the entire panel here.

Or, here are a couple highlights.

Peter Yeo, President, Better World Campaign and Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy, United Nations Foundations: “It’s not just about buying the vaccines, because buying the vaccines is the easy part. It’s the deployment and reaching everybody, including the poorest of the poor.”

Dr. Nicole Bates, Deputy Director, Global Program Advocacy and Policy, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation : “For everything that makes us unique, for all of our differences, I do believe that there are some universals, like the belief that all lives have equal value, like the belief that all children no matter where they’re born deserve a healthy start to life, and that for all of us, whether or not you’re a parent, you have an instinct of wanting to prevent the most vulnerable, and if you are a parent, that you would go to great extremes to give your child the best life possible.”

It is clear. Vaccines work. But we need to be sure that everyone has access to routine immunization.

The Art of Saving a Life | GMB Akash

For many people in developing countries, vaccines are very difficult to access. The Bangladeshi mothers in the photo above, used as a striking example by Dr. Bates during the panel, make their way through a river during monsoon season by the “safest” route to get their children immunized. Can you imagine how challenging that would be? And we complain about waiting in line at Walgreens to get our annual flu shots!

This paper from the National Institute of Health uses a bunch of fancy words to explain how serious this problem is in Bangladesh. The researchers discovered that parents were more likely to vaccinate boys than girls, and educated mothers are more likely to vaccinate their children. We were shocked to read that vaccine coverage for the poorest quintile was 70% of the well-to-do. And, it seems that some communities are more willing to vaccinate than are others! Just like Dr. Yeo said, getting vaccines to everyone is the actual hard part.

But, there is so much that we can do to help ensure that more people have access to global health initiatives like vaccines! Get involved now by signing the petition to call on G7 leaders to invest in maternal, newborn, and child health.