World Immunisation Week 2024
The writer is a doctor based in Islamabad. He tweets @drkhalidshab
Last week of April is World Immunisation Week. These seven days serve as a cause for celebration for the world in terms of how vaccines are one of humanity’s greatest achievements and how these golden bullets have given new meaning to our lives. For Pakistan however, this week is a shameful reminder that we are amongst the only two countries in the world where polio remains.
It is a shame that Pakistanis have to give proof of their polio vaccination status every time they cross borders. It is unfortunate that Hajj and Umrah pilgrims from Pakistan are queued up separately and given a shot of oral polio vaccine before entering the Kingdom.
Polio vaccinators in our country face death threats from anti-vaccine groups and many have even lost their lives in the process. Polio workers reaching remote and otherwise inaccessible areas such as the northern parts of Pakistan face vaccine hesitancy by parents who dub this vaccination campaign as an attempt to poison and harm their children. Even doctors are caught in the whirlpool as one of my colleagues, after getting the flu shot, commented, “Ever since I got the flu vaccine, I think I tend to get sick more often than when I was unvaccinated.”
The same uncertainty was witnessed during the Covid-19 pandemic which shook the world. A large segment of Pakistanis believed the Covid vaccine as a conspiracy against Muslims and an attack by the West on their faith. Many claimed that instead of genuine vaccines they were injecting electronic chips, some sort of a bioweapon, under the skin in an attempt to make the recipient infertile.
This hostility and suspicion towards vaccination programmes took a major leap after the alleged fake vaccination campaign which was used by the CIA back in 2011 to track down Osama bin Laden. This further weakened the trust amongst locals and threw the real vaccine drive in a rabbit hole.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), vaccine hesitancy is among the top 10 global health threats. Vaccines save 3.5-5 million lives every year across the globe by preventing more than 20 different types of life-threatening diseases enabling individuals of all ages to live longer and healthier lives.
The Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI), started by the WHO in 1974, is a global health mission to ensure equal access to life-saving vaccines for every child, irrespective of geographical or socioeconomic constraints. Over the years, the EPI has evolved from featuring just 6 vaccines in its barracks to now 13. Thankfully, the EPI programme has been adopted by most public and private sector hospitals across Pakistan.
So, what can be done to address the growing tide of vaccine phobia back home? Starting with education, we need to build our literacy rate. A literate population will naturally have a broader sense of vision and will see things through a cleaner and bigger lens. This will make vaccine acceptance easier, the same way we slowly started trusting medicines. We have to educate our population that this is not a holy war between the West and us, this is not a battle between good and evil, this is a fight against a common enemy for mere existence. Our clerics stand at the fulcrum and must join hands with local and provincial authorities to filter out vaccine myths from facts.
Blood has shed, health facilities have burnt, and Pakistan has suffered. Our people are swimming with sharks in a sea of myths and fears. We have to save them before a new pandemic rocks our vaccine-hating population again.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 2nd, 2024.
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