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In Pakistan, pandemics and polio are clashing.

Continuing efforts to eliminate this highly contagious disease is undoubtedly difficult for the country. (Pakistan is one of the few pockets in the world that is still in circulation.) However, lessons learned from its polio efforts have proven useful in coronavirus vaccination campaigns.

Inside story

First of all, the background is a little in place.

Pandemics are not the only obstacle to polio’s efforts. Four years ago, Pakistan was celebrated as it approached the eradication of the disease. After that, a viral video that overturned the effort appeared.

In April 2019, a private school teacher made several videos claiming that children were infected with the polio vaccine.

In one video, the teacher Nazar Muhammad Gesture to a boy sitting on a stretcher in a hospital. “They are all lying unconsciously, look!” He shouts.

The video was clearly fake. Even when Muhammad is speaking, the children are sitting. Then he orders them to lie down, perhaps unconscious, and they do.

The obvious fake made no difference: TVideo he shot nearby The northwestern city of Peshawar quickly spread as a local Journalists took up the claim as a fact And we will broadcast them nationwide.

“It spread like fire,” he says. Lana Safdar |, Coordinator of the National Emergency Operations Center for Polio Eradication in Pakistan. “People have even begun to make public announcements at the mosque, unfortunately the children are sick, so don’t vaccinate your children.”

Mob Torched clinic..Armed groups killed guards Polio workers..Parents About 25,000 vaccinated children Fearing that they might be ill, he hurried them to the hospital. And the number of parents who refuse the vaccine has skyrocketed, Safdar says.

“The national campaign missed nearly 2.5 to 3 million children,” he says.

Get back on track

Since then, the government has tried to get the polio campaign back on track.

“Our road was really, really bumpy,” says Safdar. “We have begun a new battle.”

According to Safdar, the incident spotlighted how little protection against disinformation on social media was. Facebook also noticed.

“What I saw in April was something I had never seen before,” he said. Salim Aziz |, Facebook’s Head of Public Policy in South Asia. “What we have noticed in Pakistan is that this is not only your average vaccine repellent issue, but this is a national emergency.”

Following the explosive viral video, Aziz said Facebook began removing false information she described as potentially “harmful to the real world.” They included accusations of health care workers who were spies that could cause fatal attacks.

Facebook has also amplified validated information about vaccines from the United Nations, the Government of Pakistan and others, and created the first page to appear in the search for vaccines on the platform. Safdar says it has set up its own social media surveillance department with a small number of Pakistanis.

Pandemic pause

However, only a few months later, the pandemic began and the vaccination campaign was suspended for four months. This “allowed the poliovirus to spread freely,” said Dr. Hamid Jaffari, Head of Polio Eradication in the East Mediterranean region of the World Health Organization.

The number has steadily increased from just 7 in 2017 to 167 in 2020. Polio mass vaccination drive has resumed. July last year, And January, Pakistan Held the first large drive in 2021Employs approximately 285,000 healthcare workers to reach 40 million children under the age of five.

Among the vaccinated people was Zeenat Parveen, who was assigned to reach out to children in the alleys of Rawalpindi, a city near the capital of Pakistan.

She quarreled with a hawker selling vegetables and went back and forth between children playing in the alleys. A blue cooler filled with vaccine vials hung from her shoulder with a long strap. “I’ve been vaccinated here for three days,” she tells NPR. “Now I’m checking if I missed something.”

She knocked on the door, but there was no response. She barges through a flimsy metal door and laughs. “I’m from here,” she tells me. “it’s okay.”

She chats with her parents and gestures to a boy wandering in a stairwell. “Shaari!” She shouts, “Come here!” She checks his little fingernail. There are traces of ink there, indicating that he has been vaccinated. Outside, Parveen scribbles on the door with chalk. It reads: 4 children; vaccinated in January. Most doors in Pakistan are marked with similar information.

Currently, denials are very rare.

Most parents who refuse the vaccine primarily believe that sterilizing Islamic children is a Western conspiracy, says WHO Jaffari.

“It really took hold,” says Fatima Akram Hayat, a health adviser to the Government of Pakistan. In areas where people are forgotten by authorities and have few other medical services, emotions are strongest, but polio vaccinated workers repeatedly come to their homes.

She says people who refuse the vaccine believe that the government doesn’t care about the vaccine at all. “So why are these workers coming to my village and vaccinated my children?”

Polio eradication activists acknowledge that basic medical services in these areas need to be improved to overcome vaccine resistance. “There is a great deal of focus on improving the scope of routine immunization and improving’our basic health provision’to address malnutrition, clean water and hygiene,” Safdar said. I will.

Take advantage of polio experience

Pakistan’s COVID-19 vaccine is expected to begin rolling out this month, and the country’s established polio eradication infrastructure, from the military of health care workers to detailed surveillance mapping of virus outbreaks, will monitor and curb the spread of COVID. Already useful for. 19.

“We have played a major role in responding to the COVID pandemic,” he said. Jaffari.. “Pakistan, given Polio’s assets, would be in a good position to support its vaccine deployment program.”

Jaffari says tens of thousands of healthcare workers know how to get a mass vaccination. They know almost every house in Pakistan. They know how to track vaccine rejection.

However, health adviser Hayato says they have problems if the conspiracy theory about the COVID-19 vaccine takes hold. “Our current strategy is to work on it before it happens,” she says.

Already there are signs of concern: recent polls say Almost 50% of more than 1,000 Pakistanis The subject of the survey does not want to be vaccinated.Most are worried Potential side effects, Not a conspiracy theory, but it means that health officials already have steep hills to climb.

“It’s like a game of Jenga,” says Hayato. “Everything can be going well, and one thing that happens, one that the conspiracy theory takes hold, or one that we’re wrong, and everything can collapse. . “