Via The Guardian: Killings of police and polio workers halt Pakistan vaccine drive. Excerpt:
A federal government campaign to vaccinate more than 40 million children under five against polio in Pakistan has been suspended following a series of attacks on workers and police over the past week.
On 23 April a police officer responsible for protecting polio workers was gunned down in Bannu. The same day, a polio worker was injured with a knife in Lahore by a man refusing to allow his child to be vaccinated, citing a recent hoax video that claimed children were becoming ill after the immunisations.
A second police officer was killed in Buner as he accompanied a polio team.
A 35-year-old female polio worker was shot and killed on Thursday in Chaman, Balochistan, close to the border with Afghanistan. A 24-year-old colleague was also seriously wounded in the attack.
Further attacks on staff in Sindh, Balochistan and Punjab have also been reported.
The violence was preceded by a series of rumours intended to derail Pakistan’s campaign to eradicate the disease.
On 22 April several thousand children were taken to hospital in the north-west of the country by panicked parents after a video circulated on Facebook in which a man attested that children were falling sick following vaccinations.
Hours later, a bizarre second video emerged, in which the same man attempted to show that children had fallen ill after the immunisations by ordering school boys to lie down in hospital beds and pretend to be unconscious. A mob went on to set fire to part of a government health facility. Thirteen people are being investigated over the incident.
The disruption has led to the suspension of the campaign’s “follow-up and evaluation”, earmarking children missed in the initial intensive vaccine drive.
Vaccinators and police teams have previously been targeted in the country, where rumours have persisted about immunisation programmes being harmful or a cover for foreign interests. But a shift to recruiting local workers for the door-to-door campaigns – people known and trusted in their communities and with the right language skills and access – had led to better acceptance.
Pakistan has seen a 96% reduction in polio cases since 2014. It is one of three countries that has yet to eliminate the disease, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria.
Khalida Nasareen, 61, area supervisor in Orangi Town in the north of Karachi, said: “Absolutely, God willing, we will end polio soon, but unfortunately bad people try to run down our work. We have to face that propaganda head on. It hurts but it passes and we will bring it back to where we were.
“If we can save the life of one child, I feel as though I’m contributing to saving humanity. Ours is a poor neighbourhood which lacks basic services and with poverty comes lack of awareness and education. It’s a cause I’m willing to die for.”
