Monstrous rumors stir up hostility to Pakistan's anti-polio campaign

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) – His shawl half covered his bearded face, but Hameedullah Khan's fear and ignorance came as he sent a scary message to anyone trying to vaccinate his children against polio.

"I'm going to stab anyone who comes to my home with drops of polio," Khan grumbled, refusing to be filmed or photographed while he was shopping in a bazaar-blown flies on the outskirts of Peshawar , a city marked by years on the Islamist militant front In Pakistan.

This dangerous hostility to vaccination teams erupted last week after hard-line religious in the city spread rumors, raising fears among social media that children were poisoned and died of contaminated polio vaccines.

Rumors spread like wildfire, triggering a massive panic in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Crowds burned a village health center, blocked a highway and looted cars with stones. Medical workers have been harassed and threatened.

The mosques announced that their children suffered from cramps, vomiting and diarrhea after receiving "toxic" polio drops. We learned on social media that children had died.

The panicked parents rushed their children to the hospitals, crushing the health authorities. In Peshawar alone, about 45,000 children were taken to the hospital with nausea and vertigo. The officials described this experience as a collective hysteria, saying that no deaths had been confirmed.

KILLED BY MILITANTS

It is easy to feed the fears of communities under siege, as in northwestern Pakistan.

Mistrust of foreigners and modernity largely explains why Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan are two of the three countries in the world – Nigeria is the third – where polio remains endemic.

Some Muslim clerics have been peddling stories that vaccines were part of a Western conspiracy to make Muslims sterile, while militant groups have killed nearly 100 health workers and their guards since 2012 on the pretext that they are not safe. they could be Western spies.

These killings intensified after a Peshawar doctor involved in the anti-polio campaign helped US forces find and eliminate al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in 2011.

At the end of the week, militants shot dead a medical staff member and two policemen overseeing other vaccination teams in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the neighboring province of Baluchistan.

But the magnitude of the latest reaction against a polio eradication campaign is a novelty for government officials, who fear that suspicions and ideas back from an extremist minority have infected the big public.

"Mistrust of a segment of society, which refuses vaccinations because of religious beliefs, is reflected in the rest of the country, something that has not been seen before," said Babar Atta, the largest coordinator of the government in the fight against polio. Reuters.

Every year, the Pakistani government organizes public education campaigns and recruits Muslim religious leaders to reassure the population, but their suspicions persist.

Following 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 could cause paralysis or death.

"No drops for us in the future!", Saif-ur-Rehman, a father of eight, repeated rumors that vaccines were contaminated or expired.

"Even my son was saying," Next time they will bring polio drops to school, I will get up and run away from school. "I said," Do that "."

PLAY DEAD

An investigation revealed that false stories came from two schools on the outskirts of Peshawar. Provincial officials have asked health workers to vaccinate students in Dar-ul-Qalam and Roza-tul-Atfaal schools.

The investigators also identified and arrested a man seen in a video telling dozens of children to pose as if the vaccine had made them unconscious, said Farooq Jameel, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's senior health official.

The police also arrested 16 other men, some of whom had threatened vaccination teams in the streets.

A provincial official of a conservative Islamist party that authorities said had links with the school's owners denied any connection with them and then approved the vaccination program.

"I've vaccinated my own children and will continue to administer the polio vaccine to them at a certain age, but people have misconceptions and doubts about the polio vaccine, and the government needs to address their concerns, "said Abdul Wasey, secretary general of Pakistan's Jamat Pakistan to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, told Reuters.

But the damage has been done.

Pakistan has made tremendous progress in the fight against polio, but officials said that while the latest vaccination campaign had helped vaccinate 37.6 million children, 1.4 million n & # 39; They had not been protected.

Citing fears of attacks on health workers, the authorities canceled two days of catch-up for the vaccination campaign last week.

The global campaign against the disease in recent decades has been a great success, with the World Health Organization (WHO) reporting only 33 polio cases worldwide in 2018.

But most of them were in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the danger is that, as long as one child remains infected, the virus can spread quickly to polio-free countries and non-polio-free populations. immune.

There is no cure for poliomyelitis, but the disease can be prevented if children receive multiple treatments with the vaccine.

Nadia Gul, a housewife, is one of the volunteer health workers who make up the immunization teams. Two children from his immediate family are victims of polio.

Covering her face with a veil to talk to strangers, Gul spoke of the dangers she faces due to the heinous insults propagated by poorly educated opponents, but she refuses to be intimidated.

"We have fears in our minds and in our hearts, but we do not lose heart," Gul told Reuters. "Our goal, the goal of all polio workers, is to end this plague in our country so that no child, God forbid, is paralyzed."