Militants attack polio vaccinators

Pakistan on Monday decided to move ahead with a nationwide campaign to vaccinate millions of children, hours after gunmen shot dead a police man guarding a team of polio vaccine workers.

The health workers escaped the attack unhurt, officials said.

The attack occurred in the Kohat district of the conservative and volatile province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa on Sunday, two days after the campaign started.

Pakistan started a polio programme in 1994 and came very close to eliminating the disease but recorded 147 cases, a five-year high, in 2019, amid vaccine boycotts and attacks on health workers.

Militants linked with al-Qaeda have attacked polio vaccinators, killing a dozen and undermining the campaign.

The militants accused the health workers of acting as spies and claimed that the polio vaccine seek to sterilise Muslim children.

Pakistan is one of the two countries where people suffered the crippling disease, alongside neighbouring Afghanistan.

According to official statistics, only one case of polio has been reported so far this year.

The decline was seen as a huge success, as the numbers have fallen from 84 new cases last year to 147 in 2019.

But for this year the authorities decided to go ahead with their plan to expand the scope of their drive to the entire country.

“More than 40 million children under the age of five will be vaccinated with the polio vaccine, along with a supplementary dose of vitamin A during the campaign,’’ a Health Ministry official said on Monday.

More than 290,000 health workers, mostly young women, were to go door-to-door for the vaccination campaign to protect children from lifelong paralysis caused by the polio virus, Shahzad Baig, head of the country’s UN-funded polio eradication programme had said.