Anti-vaxxers stand in the way of Pakistan's last fight against polio | Asia

Nowshera, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province – On Saturday at 11 am, Tayyaba Gul and her team of polio campaign workers enter a school in Nowshera, a town in northwestern Pakistan.

A week earlier, agitated parents had instructed teachers to prevent immunization teams from immunizing their children against the polio virus, saying the vaccine was harmful and able to poison their children .

Gul, a polio eradication activist, hoped to restore their confidence.

Today, Pakistan is one of the last countries to possess wild poliovirus and has reported at least 15 cases this year.

While poliovirus has been eradicated worldwide, it remains endemic in Nigeria.From Afghanistan and Pakistan, where she still handicaps children every year.

In recent years, however, Pakistan has been able to celebrate a sharp drop after more than 300 cases were recorded in 2014. This success was largely motivated by more than 250,000 polio workers who have ventured into remote and remote areas. inaccessible from the country. administer vaccines to children under five.

However, recent eradication efforts have been thwarted by the suspicions of parents and the general public that the vaccine is dangerous, motivated by misinformation spread on social media.

In April, a polio worker in Balochistan and two policemen escorting immunization officers to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were shot dead. In another incident, a passionate crowd set fire to a health center in Peshawar city, northwestern Pakistan, claiming that many children were living with the vaccine.

While videos claiming to expose the dangers of the vaccine were gaining ground online, more and more people were refusing and attacks on polio workers were on the rise, prompting the government to temporarily suspend campaign activities.

The public fears that the campaign against polio will become a front for harmful actors, a myth that has its roots in false vaccination campaign orchestrated by the CIA in 2011 to find Osama bin Laden in the country.

Persistent mistrust has forced health workers such as Gul to work overtime to provide accurate information to the public, by organizing awareness sessions in public schools and religious seminars.

The Gul team also hires influential members of the community – the imams, teachers, local politicians and powerful owners spread the message that the vaccine is safe.

In Nowshera, about two hours from the capital Islamabad, refusals increased by more than 88,000 in April, against 256 in March alone, according to Waqar Ahmed Khan, district coordinator at Youth Catalyst Pakistan (YCP).

Under Gul's leadership, YCP runs a network of health centers in Pakistan focused on fighting the polio virus.

Working in high-risk areas of polio transmission in Nowshera, Gul and his YCP team are working to address the vaccine as part of a broader health initiative.

"Some teachers asked me," Why are you concentrating only on polio? "," Gul told Al Jazeera. "Why not other diseases? Why is this one more important?" They said, "This vaccine is manufactured by the United States, it is not locally manufactured." "

Haseena Bibi, 23, who works at the YCP, said one of the ways to combat vaccine denial is to inform people that they can also find drugs for common diseases such as cancer. fever and flu.

"Some people mistakenly think that it causes infertility, others say they have other medical problems that we do not treat," said Nageena Arshad, one of the government's immunization vaccinators. Nowshera.

Given entrenched poverty and substandard health care infrastructure, initial community confidence in a vaccine is often low.

Many people see the lack of public spending on basic health services as a sign of widespread neglect and are therefore wary of free vaccines.

In short, people do not know why the government would intervene in a health emergency while ignoring several others.

Hansa Bibi, a 30-year-old mother of two in Nowshera, refuses the vaccine for her children.

"America is our enemy, why are they giving us a free vaccine?" she told Al Jazeera.

"They put ingredients [forbidden in Islam] in the vaccine to sterilize the Muslim population. They put things that make all children vomit, "said Bibi, adding that Nowshera hospitals were recently swollen with sick children." My in-laws have taken the vaccine, but I will not give it to my children. "

Bibi says most of his opinions are formed by Facebook posts and Urdu-language TV channels.

She is angry with the Pakistani government for promoting the vaccine, which she says causes impotence and can harm children.

"In mosques, imams say that these vaccines come from a foreign laboratory … We are poor and people say," Take this thing for free, "but we say we do not want it.

"Why are Americans sending vaccines instead of flour?"

"The government always sends a polio team home with oral drops, but we do not know why they always come so much."

This is not an easy situation. We have done a lot of polio work over the last seven to eight years in Nowshera. If we stop this program, it means we start from scratch.

Tayyaba Gul activist for the eradication of polio

Faisal Khan, spokeswoman for CHIP Training and Consulting for Health in Nowshera District, said every refusal was analyzed and discussions were held with families who cited many reasons for rejecting the vaccine, including the notion that this vaccine was neither authorized nor effective in Islam, or that it can even sterilize the population.

The government should make vaccination mandatory, he suggested.

Earlier this year, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government announced that it would block identity cards of parents who refuse the vaccine for their children.

To build trust, YCP also provides free medical services, such as prenatal and postnatal care for pregnant women, and routine immunizations for women and their children.

During a recent campaign against polio in the Nowshera region Nihar Bibi, a health worker, was approached by two young visitors – aged 8 and 10 – who were asking for medicines for a skin problem.

The area does not have public hospitals and the center is often the only health center in the neighborhood.

Most patients are not there with the polio vaccine in mind; they are concerned about pneumonia, urinary tract infection or fever.

Naeem Ullah, who works on the immunization program and trains religious leaders, says that it is paramount to raise awareness about the effectiveness of the vaccine.

"When people know their benefits, they can benefit their children."

Last week, a father of an unvaccinated child in Nowshera threatened to put Ullah to the door when he knocked on the door. Stating that he needed food and not vaccines, the father expressed doubts about the safety of the vaccine.

"I told him:" I'll drink this in front of you, and I'll accompany you to the mosque if you have religious opposition to the vaccine, "Ullah said.

Later, the man accepted the oral drops for his child.

"The campaign against polio has been very tough," said Zubair Shah, YCP's Monitoring and Evaluation Officer.

Usually, Shah spends the post-polio campaign period with vaccinators in homes where parents have denied access to children; However, the suspension of these follow-up visits redirected the YCP's efforts.

The center is now trying to mobilize influential community leaders.

"It's not an easy situation," says Gul. "We have been working hard on polio for the last seven to eight years in Nowshera, so if we stop this program, it means we are starting from scratch again."