Whooping cough or pertussis is special among vaccinepreventable diseases because neither infection nor vaccinations confer lifelong or long-lasting protection. Young infants are particularly vulnerable to the infection, and they carry the greatest burden of severe cases and deaths. Immunisation with whole-cell or acellular pertussis vaccines has reduced the number of notified cases and deaths in many parts of the world. However, WHO has long tried to tackle the worldwide pertussis morbidity and mortality in infants and children. More than 25 years ago, Artur Galazka1 proposed a method for estimating the number of deaths from pertussis; subsequently, Natasha Crowcroft and co-workers2 described a model based on data from up to 1999 that resulted in an estimated number of 30 million pertussis cases and 390 000 deaths from pertussis worldwide in children younger than 5 years. In The Lancet Infectious Diseases, researchers from Hong Kong and WHO describe the results of rerunning this model with data from 2014 and new assumptions on the effect of one or two vaccine doses. 3 The investigators estimate that there were around 24 million cases and 160 000 deaths from pertussis in children younger than 5 years in 2014, a significant reduction compared with the 1999 model. It is thus reassuring to assume that in these 15 years, hundreds of thousands of deaths in infants might have been averted by higher vaccine coverage. Taking a closer look, the estimated number of deaths in sensitivity analysis ranges from 38 000 to 670 000, with the African region contributing the greatest share. In another dataset from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015, the number of pertussis deaths was estimated to be between roughly 19 000 and 117 000, again mostly occurring in Africa. 4 There is a lack of reliable surveillance data and diagnostic laboratory capacity, especially in regions of the world (not only in Africa) where most of