Plot against polio drive

Polio still exists in Pakistan, apart from only two more countries — Afghanistan and Nigeria — across the world. The past year has seen 12 cases of polio virus surfacing in the country while the ongoing year has had its first reported case of the crippling disease last month. That the latest incident occurred in Karachi, and not in any far-off place, puts a question mark on the efficacy of no less than hundred anti-polio campaigns carried out in the country over the past decade. The persistence of polio is mainly blamed on refusals by parents, especially in the remote parts of the country, to get their children vaccinated against the paralysing infection. Obscurantist elements have long been involved in spreading rumours about certain hormones being added to the oral polio vaccine as part of a conspiracy to make Muslim children sterile. Such rumours have given rise to suspicion about the vaccine among the people, affecting the outcome of the successive efforts to eradicate the disease.

In what is perceived as a plot to sabotage the ongoing immunisation campaign in K-P, misinformation was spread about the anti-polio vaccine in a series of videos that went viral on social media. The videos show a resident of Peshawar at Hayatabad Medical Complex, where children from a school in Badhber were admitted with complaints of headaches, nausea and abdominal pain after receiving the anti-polio vaccine. One of the videos shows the man alleging that the vaccine caused the children to fall unconscious, and then ordering a group of children present there to ‘fall asleep’. The children then lie down on the hospital bed behind them as if unconscious. In another video, the same man tells reporters that some of the children have even died. The misinformation triggered a protest by locals who vandalised a hospital and set a Basic Health Unit on fire. That the matter needs to be probed thoroughly goes without saying. 

Published in The Express Tribune, April 24^th, 2019.

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