Polio vaccine in crossfire of false information

Another deadly disease, polio, is the latest target for online false alarm campaigns as scientists around the world are rushing to find vaccines to stop the Covid-19 epidemic.

The World Health Organization (WHO) celebrated the August 25 announcement that Africa has eradicated wild poliovirus.

However, there is still a version of the disease called polio derived from the vaccine. This occurs in rare cases where the weakened virus of the vaccine mutates.

This has implications for countries with particularly low immunization rates and poor hygiene, medical experts say.

Two days after the WHO announcement, the United Nations confirmed that more than 12 cases of vaccine-derived polio had occurred in nine states in Sudan.

The outbreak added more fuel to the already frequent spread of conspiracy theories and pushed forward false claims about vaccination on social media.

The conspiracy theory group immediately reported the outbreak in an article accusing it of “one of the biggest public health scandals in a decade,” and featured WHO and billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates in the attack.

read: Lessons from the polio campaign to the world

The misleading article condemning the “gate-funded vaccine” for “causing” the outbreak has been shared more than 8,000 times by Facebook groups from the United States and Canada to Colombia.

The claim spread to Europe and the French version of the article was shared by various groups in France and Belgium.

However, the article failed to mention that they involved people who had not been vaccinated themselves.

Gates, whose well-known foundation has spent billions of dollars on the production of vaccines against diseases like polio, malaria, and HIV, has accused the surrounding groups of benefiting or even harming vaccinations. It is a regular target.

Tens of thousands of times, shared by a Facebook post in the spring, falsely claimed that the polio vaccine tested by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation paralyzed 4,90,000 children in India.

And last month, a viral YouTube video claimed that philanthropists wanted to force Africa to be vaccinated and “populated.”

Gates, who pledged $ 250 million to fight the Covid-19 crisis, accused “a very bad combination of pandemics and social media and people seeking a very simple explanation” to curb rumors. I did.

According to the WHO, 1,271 people worldwide have caught vaccine-derived polio in the last decade.

The disease usually spreads when the weakened vaccine virus is excreted by the vaccinated person and infects others through contaminated water or food.

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Oliver Rosenbauer, a spokesman for WHO’s polio eradication program, said that while pollution can actually “passively immunize other children,” it is devastating in countries with low immunization rates. He told AFP Fact Check that it could have results.

“The virus is allowed to continue to spread to find vulnerable unvaccinated children, which causes problems if there is an under-vaccinated community,” he said.

“Over time, it will return to a stock that is actually a strong stock and is no longer a weak stock.”

According to WHO, people are protected from both vaccine-derived poliovirus and wild poliovirus when the population is “fully vaccinated.”

The United Nations health agency has warned of a surge in vaccine-derived polio cases in recent years. In 2019, more than 360 cases were recorded, compared to 104 cases in 2018 and 96 cases in 2017.

Outbreaks are currently occurring in 16 countries across the continent, and new coronaviruses have stopped several vaccination campaigns.

However, new vaccines that are “genetically non-mutable” are on the card, said Richard Mihigo, WHO Program Area Manager for Immunization and Vaccine Development in Africa.

The new oral polio vaccine (nOPV), which is “more genetically stable” and “non-mutatable,” will be introduced at the end of the month, he said.