Tens of millions of Pakistani children are missing their anti-polio vaccination due to the coronavirus lockdown, raising fears that more children would contract the crippling disease this year.
Pakistan launched a polio eradication programme in 1994 and the country came very close to eliminating it but recorded a five-year high of new cases amid vaccine boycotts and attacks on health workers in 2019.
“We had to cancel the nationwide anti-polio vaccination campaign scheduled in April due to the coronavirus lockdown,’’ a senior official at the programme said on Tuesday.
At least 40 million children under the age of five have missed the vaccine and the periodic vaccination campaigns have been suspended until June.
“The missed campaign is going to have a really bad impact because we missed one in last April and there were 146 cases in 2019,’’ he said.
This year’s case count has already reached 41 and the country has diverted all the resources from its fragile health system to fight coronavirus.
The UN-funded drive to vaccinate children faces opposition from militants and religious conservatives, who believe the vaccine, administered in multiple rounds, is intended to make Muslim children sterile.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are among a handful of countries where polio is still prevalent.
