Anti-vaccination propaganda: 1,100,000 refusals emerge in Peshawar alone

PESHAWAR: A seemingly organised campaign launched against polio immunisation allegedly on the basis of rumours last week is stated to have caused a huge loss to the polio vaccination efforts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as in Peshawar alone, 11,00,000 children, out of 16,00,000, refused to be vaccinated during the latest round, official sources told The News.

“Please don’t ask me about the figures as the data about refusals is the worst. We had never come across with refusals in such alarming numbers in KP before,” an official of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Health Department told The News when reached for comments and government strategy to counter propaganda against polio vaccine and reach out children.

Pleading anonymity, he said that the government had to suspend a three-day anti-polio campaign in many areas of the province last week to ensure the security of the polio workers.

“In future, the biggest challenge is the accessibility to the children and security of the polio workers as some of the elements are still out to put pressure by spreading rumours against polio vaccine,” said the official.He said many government officials were still astonished as to how and why such organised propaganda was launched against the polio vaccine on April 22.

Sharing the official data, he said they planned to reach 16,00,000 children in Peshawar in the three-day campaign.However, he said owing to strong propaganda by certain elements against the polio vaccine and other hurdles created for the polio workers, 1100,000 children could not be vaccinated in the recent campaign.

He said they were collecting figures from other districts in the province, which, he said, were not different than the provincial capital.“Out of 1.8 million children in Peshawar, 800,000 were from zero to five years while the remaining 800,000 were between five and 10 years,” he said.

He termed the surge in refusals a “huge loss” to the years’ long efforts against polio eradication in Pakistan, particularly in KP.The World Health Organisation (WHO) last week declared that poliovirus has been interrupted and for the first time the sewerage water sample collected from Shaheen Muslim Town in Peshawar has shown ‘NO’ presence of Wild Poliovirus.

These sewage samples are collected and analyzed every month from 59 locations throughout the country.The sample from Peshawar was collected on April 10, and it was after the quality of vaccination that poliovirus was restricted in the city.

However, the health experts feared that it would damage the efforts made in the past to eradicate poliovirus.“The refusals would spoil all efforts in the past. Though restricted, the virus exists in the sewage of Peshawar. And then we reported polio cases,” said a paediatrician in the Khyber Teaching Hospital (KTH).

He said the government should involve elected representatives, opinion makers, health experts and religious leaders to counter the propaganda against polio vaccine and also redress genuine queries of the people regarding the recent alleged reaction of the vaccine to the children.

A senior official associated with an international organisation also confirmed the rising number of refusals and termed it a major issue.“We are heading towards the same situation that we faced in South Waziristan and North Waziristan where local militants had banned polio vaccination. For two years, polio workers were kept away from reaching children there that caused a rise in polio cases in Pakistan,” said the official.

And in 2014 when the military launched a major offensive ‘Zarb-e-Azb’ against the militants, people were displaced from native villages and towns and accommodated in the camps. And it was the first time that Pakistan reported 306 polio cases in 2014.

However, frequent campaigns and effective strategy adopted by national and international health organisations in the erstwhile Fata brought down the numbers of polio cases from 306 to nine only.

The issue was created on April 22 when some of the children were brought to a government-run hospital and complained that they had fallen ill after getting the polio vaccine.Within no time, parents started taking children to hospitals that led violent protesters in Peshawar and some of the angry villagers in nearby Mashokhel even to set on fire a Basic Health Unit (BHU).

According to Health Minister Dr Hisham Inamullah Khan, 44,000 children were taken to hospitals in KP and 25,000 of them alone were shifted to the four hospitals in Peshawar.Pakistan has reported eight polio cases in 2019, in which six were reported from KP, one each from Karachi and Lahore. “People should understand that they are not doing any good to this country and their children by refusing polio vaccine to kids,” stated an official of an international organisation.