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 "I will stab anyone who comes to my house with polio drops," Khan
growled, refusing to be filmed or photographed as he shopped in a
fly-blown bazaar on the outskirts of Peshawar, a city scarred by
years on the frontline of Islamist militancy in Pakistan.
This dangerous hostility to immunization teams flared last week
after religious hardliners in the city spread false rumors, raising
a scare on social media that some children were being poisoned and
dying from contaminated polio vaccines.
The rumors spread like wildfire, triggering mass panic in
northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Mobs burned a village
health center, blocked a highway and pelted cars with stones.
Medical workers were harassed and threatened.
Mosques made announcements that children were having cramps,
vomiting and diarrhea after they were given "poisonous" polio drops.
Word went out on social media that some children had died.
Panicked parents rushed their children to hospitals, overwhelming
health authorities. In Peshawar alone, about 45,000 children were
brought to hospitals complaining of nausea and dizziness. Officials
described it as mass hysteria, asserting there had been no deaths
confirmed.
KILLED BY MILITANTS
It is easy to feed the fears of communities that feel under siege,
as in northwest Pakistan.
Mistrust of outsiders and modernity goes a long way to explaining
why Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan are two of just three
countries in the world - Nigeria is the third - where polio remains
endemic.
Some Muslim clerics have peddled stories that the vaccines are part
of Western plot to make Muslims sterile, while militant groups have
killed nearly 100 health workers and their guards since 2012 on the
pretext that they could be Western spies.
Those killings escalated after a doctor in Peshawar involved in the
campaign against polio helped U.S. forces track down and eliminate
al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011.
Just late week, militants shot and killed a medical worker and two
policemen guarding other vaccination teams in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
and neighboring Baluchistan province.
But the scale of the most recent backlash against a campaign to
eradicate polio is something new for government officials, who worry
that the suspicions and backward thinking of a hardline minority has
infected the wider public.
"The mistrust in one segment of society, that refuses vaccinations
due to religious beliefs, is translating into the rest of the
country, which is something not seen in the past," Babar Atta, the
government's top coordinator in the drive against polio, told
Reuters.
Every year Pakistan's government mounts public education campaigns
and recruits Muslim religious leaders to reassure people, but their
suspicions persist.
As a result of last week's false rumors, families of hundreds of
thousands of children in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and elsewhere refused to
participate in the latest campaign to eradicate a virus that can
cause paralysis or death.
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"No drops for us in the future!," Saif-ur-Rehman, a father of eight,
repeating the rumors that the vaccines were contaminated or expired.
"Even my son was saying: 'The next time they bring polio drops to
school, I am going to get up and run away from school'. I said, 'Do
that'."
PLAYING DEAD
An inquiry found the false stories originated at two schools on the
outskirts of Peshawar. Health workers seeking to vaccinate pupils
from the Dar-ul-Qalam and Roza-tul-Atfaal schools had met with
repeated refusals, according to provincial officials.
Investigators also identified and arrested a man seen in a video
telling dozens of children to pose as if the vaccine had rendered
them unconscious, Farooq Jameel, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's senior-most
health official, said.
Police also arrested 16 other men, some of whom had threatened
vaccination teams on the streets.
A provincial leader of a conservative Islamist party that officials
suspected had some links to the schools' owners denied any
connection and went on to endorse the immunization program.
"I have been vaccinating my own children and will continue to give
them polio vaccine till a certain age, but people have some
misconception and doubts about polio vaccine, and the government
needs to address their concerns," Abdul Wasey, secretary-general of
Jamat-e-Islami Pakistan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, told Reuters.
But the damage has been done.
Pakistan has made huge strides in tackling polio, but officials say
that while the latest immunization drive succeeded in inoculating
37.6 million children, 1.4 million were left unprotected.
Citing fears of attacks on health workers, authorities called off a
two-day catch up for the vaccination drive last week.
The global campaign against the disease over the past few decades
has been a great success story, with the World Health Organization
(WHO) reporting just 33 cases of polio worldwide in 2018.
But most of them were in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the danger is
that so long as a single child remains infected the virus can
quickly spread into polio-free countries and un-immunized
populations.
There is no known cure for polio, but the disease can be prevented
if children are given multiple treatments with the vaccine.
Nadia Gul, a housewife, is among the volunteer health workers who
make up the vaccination teams. Two children in her close family are
victims of polio.
Covering her face with a veil to talk with strangers, Gul spoke of
the dangers she faces due to the heinous slurs propagated by
ill-educated opponents, but she refuses to be cowed.
"We have fears in our minds and in our hearts, but we will not lose
courage," Gul told Reuters. "Our aim, the aim of all the polio
workers, is that we end this scourge in our country, so that no
child, God forbid, is crippled."
(Writing by Asif Shahzad and Drazen Jorgic; Editing by Simon
Cameron-Moore)
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