Last week, international agencies and health workers across Afghanistan learned that the Taliban had suspended the direct, door-to-door polio vaccination campaign that was scheduled to begin.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. The decision to halt nationwide immunizations comes just days after the World Health Organization (WHO) reported 18 new cases of polio infection in the country this year, a significant rise from the six cases reported in 2023. Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only two countries in the world that have failed to eradicate polio virus transmission.
While there was no official reason provided for the suspension, health care workers familiar with the situation reported that the Taliban want to stop all door-to-door immunizations owing to a combination of security concerns and their restrictions on women. They now plan to shift vaccination efforts to local mosques, with the expectation that families will bring their children to get the doses.
The Taliban believe that the door-to-door campaigns could be used to identify and reveal their locations to foreign threats, claiming historic precedent that such campaigns were used by Western intelligence agencies in the past to locate and target terrorists such as Osama bin Laden. That has led to widespread mistrust of the immunization campaigns, including conspiracy theories spread by militants and religious leaders that the West uses vaccines to sterilize Muslim children, or that they contain taboo ingredients, or that they weaken one’s faith; these conspiracies have prompted deadly attacks on polio workers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even before they took over the country, the Taliban had restricted door-to-door campaigns in areas they controlled.
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