Polio Vaccination Campaign Launched in Afghanistan and Pakistan: 34 Million Children to Be Vaccinated

Afghanistan and Pakistan started a vaccination campaign this Monday to vaccinate more than 34 million children against polio in the only two countries in the world where this virus is still active.

In Afghanistan, authorities plan to vaccinate more than 10 million children between 6 and 59 months in the next four days, the Afghan Ministry of Public Health said in a statement.

Districts such as Ghor, Bamyan and Dikondi, in the central part of the country, will join the campaign later after the recent rains that devastated the country, the letter said.

For its part, Pakistan’s initiative aims to vaccinate all children under five years of age: more than 9.1 million children in Punjab province, 7.9 million in Sindh, 4.4 million in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and 2.2 million children in Baluchistan, the Pakistan Polio Eradication Program said.

“To protect their children from the polio virus, more than 24 million children will receive the polio vaccine in 91 districts across the country,” the Pakistani organization said in a message on X.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where the poliovirus is still active.

However, efforts to eradicate polio in Pakistan have been thwarted for years.

The reasons range from conservative parents refusing to vaccinate their children, believing it to be an anti-Islamic act or a Western plot to sterilize children, to attacks by fundamentalists after the CIA conducted a fake vaccination campaign to hunt down Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who was killed by US commandos in 2011 in Pakistan.

Pakistan has reported two cases of polio so far this year, compared to six detected last year. 20 cases of polio were reported in 2022, followed by just one in 2021, according to government data.

The numbers in Afghanistan have increased in recent years: from two cases recorded in 2022 to 6 in 2023, the spokesman of the Ministry of Public Health of Afghanistan, Sharafat Zaman Amar, told EFE.