What the polio campaign desperately needs is strong political support.
PESHAWAR: The anti-polio campaign has received a new jolt with the recent deadly attack on a vaccination team on the outskirts of Peshawar. Apart from two attacks this past week, at least 22 vaccinators have been killed in the past year. The use of a fake vaccination campaign for hunting Osama bin Laden did not help matters either, with many people opposed to the polio campaign equating it with a plot against Islam.
The attacks provide us with a new way of looking at polio policy implementation by also examining policy flaws. For instance, despite it being well known that there is — at times violent — resistance to the polio vaccination campaign, the amount of security deployed for polio vaccinators is not substantial. The area where the last attack happened is just a few kilometres away from my village and militants hold sway over it.
To counter the hostility to the polio campaign, it is necessary to first counter the discourse that encourages resistance to the vaccination campaign. Both the state and civil society need to launch a massive awareness campaign so that people are told of the obvious benefits of vaccinating their children. Moreover, any such campaign will have to take on board the clerics since without them, there will not be enough credibility for it.
What the polio campaign desperately needs is strong political support and a willingness to provide its members adequate security.
Wasim Gohar
Young Parliamentary Associate, Senate of Pakistan
Published in The Express Tribune, October 14th, 2013.
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