Measles has killed more than 300 children since mid-March and infected more than 47,000 across Bangladesh. This is an avoidable disaster that demands accountability from interim government leaders who chose to dismantle a functional system without the competence to rebuild it. The country’s measles vaccination coverage rose steadily for two decades, becoming an international model for low-income countries. That record has now been squandered with shocking negligence by the past interim government.
The failure follows a depressingly familiar pattern: a new administration, suspicious of its predecessor’s institutional choices, opts to restructure it. The Health, Population and Nutrition Sector Programme—a framework in place since 1998—was scrapped in March 2025 without an adequate exit plan. “Bridging projects” meant to cover the transition were not approved until November 2025. Vaccine procurement stalled. Medicine supplies to more than 14,000 community clinics dwindled, and the buffer stocks that had provided a critical safety margin were exhausted. Furthermore, Bangladesh had procured vaccines through Unicef under a well-established direct procurement method. Officials changed this arrangement, directing that half the supply be obtained through open tender—despite having no experience with the process and despite explicit warnings against the change from Unicef. Not a single vaccine arrived through either of the new methods.
In public health, as in construction, you do not tear down a load-bearing wall before you have something in place to hold up the roof. The interim administration violated this principle. It suspended operational plans, eliminated the associated manpower structures, shifted funding to a revenue budget requiring approval from multiple cabinet committees, and then appeared surprised when the system seized up. Prof Sayedur Rahman, special assistant to the chief adviser for health in the interim administration, says officials were “not accustomed to the new system” and that “bureaucratic inertia” caused the delays. He claims that Unicef’s warning reached him only on December 30, 2025, leaving little time to act. But warnings of declining coverage had been sounded by epidemiologists long before that. A nationwide supplementary measles campaign—already overdue since 2020—was pushed back to April 2026. That decision alone reflects a startling misreading of urgency.
The human consequences are painful. Among confirmed measles patients, 74 percent had received neither dose of the vaccine while 14 percent had received only one. These are children who fell through a gap the health ministry itself created and then failed to close. Two additional campaigns—for deworming tablets and Vitamin A supplements—have also remained suspended for over a year, a disruption experts believe worsened children’s vulnerability to infection.
Governments inherit imperfect systems and reforming them is sometimes necessary, but that requires contingency planning and, above all, recognition that failure in the health sector is measured in lives harmed or lost. The interim government’s actions shockingly fell short. The lack of accountability warrants a probe committee—one with the authority to establish individual responsibility. The deaths of children are tragic. Those who dismantled this programme must answer for each of these deaths.
