Polio debacle

In many ways, 2024 has been a year of familiar setbacks for Pakistan. The country had to seek yet another IMF bailout, yet another government is battling constant protests, yet another wave of terror attacks and street crimes is sweeping the country and Lahore and other major cities are suffering through yet another winter of smog. However, no familiar problem quite highlights the depressing inability of the country to solve problems on a long-term basis quite like the dramatic resurgence of polio. After recording just six cases of polio in 2023, the nation has already reached at least 56 polio cases this year, with a month still left to go. The victims are almost all children and they are all suffering and, in some cases, dying unnecessarily. Unlike the other aforementioned problems, lack of money, hostile external actors, weak state capacity, or polarisation are not the issue here. If there is one thing our elites can agree on, it is that polio needs to be eradicated and that children must take the polio vaccine. And we certainly have the capacity to get rid of the illness for good. In fact, we almost did just a couple of years back. There was just one case of the wild poliovirus in 2021.

That the virus continues to persist is pretty much entirely due to self-imposed shortcomings. Thousands of parents, often from underprivileged backgrounds, still refuse to let their children take the vaccine that will keep them safe and healthy. What efforts the state has made to convince these parents otherwise appear to have hit a wall. Sindh alone recorded over 43,000 cases of vaccine refusal last month. Then there are the gaps in our healthcare networks and the disruptions caused by the security situation that lead to many children simply falling through the cracks. According to a report by the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) released in September, over four million planned vaccinations were missed during immunisation campaigns across the country in 2024. The provinces with the most tenuous security situation, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, also lead the country in polio cases.

To make matters worse, the polio workers fulfilling a vital mission and the police guarding them are often underpaid, underequipped and targets of violence. This last trend ties into vaccine refusal. That so many people still do not trust the government with their children’s health and continue to believe in malicious and unscientific anti-vaccine propaganda is an indictment of the state’s ability to build trust with all citizens and educate its people. Nothing can be more frustrating than children being paralysed or dying because the adults around them do not know better or children missing out on vaccination due to poverty or living in areas going through conflicts they did not start. Polio workers and those protecting them do not deserve to be shot at or maligned but should be paid on time and equipped with the tools they need. That this is not already the case and children are suffering needlessly is nothing short of a debacle.