Islamabad: A fake vaccination campaign conducted to help hunt down al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden has caused a backlash against international health workers in some parts of Pakistan and has impeded efforts to wipe out polio in the country; Wall Street Journal quoted the United Nations officials as saying.
A number of families across Pakistan refused vaccinations from July, when news of the fake campaign broke, to September, WSJ quoted Dennis King, chief of polio vaccinations in Pakistan for Unicef is saying.
“Following the early reports, some families in the provinces refused to have their children vaccinated citing the fake campaign as the cause,” he told
The refusals, he added, have declined since September due to vigorous campaigning by international and local health workers to ensure families they are working only to vaccinate against polio, a disease eradicated in most of the world but still prevalent in Pakistan.
Pakistan military intelligence in July detained a local doctor, Shakeel Afridi, on charges of involvement with the reportedly fake vaccination campaign, supposedly involving vaccine against hepatitis B. Pakistani officials believe the campaign was an attempt to get DNA samples from bin Laden’s family to confirm his location in a house in Abbottabad.
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