ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Sunday thanked Saudi Arabia for joining hands with Pakistan and its global partners in their fight against polio as he launched a nationwide anti-polio drive, which aims to vaccinate more than 40 million children under the age of five years.
Polio is a paralyzing disease that has no cure. Multiple doses of the oral polio vaccine and completion of the routine vaccination schedule for all children under the age of five is essential to provide children high immunity against this terrible disease.
The Pakistan polio program conducts multiple mass vaccination drives in a year, and this year’s first anti-polio vaccination campaign will formally begin on Monday, Feb. 3 and continue until Feb. 9.
PM Sharif noted that Pakistan reported over 70 cases of the virus last year, while the country has reported one polio case this year, launching the campaign by administering anti-polio vaccine to children in Islamabad.
“Now, our brotherly country, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has again joined hands [with Pakistan and global partners] against polio and they have pumped in hundreds of millions of dollars for this purpose,” Sharif said.
“I hope we will be able to, this time around, with coordinated and outstanding team efforts, [we] will be able to eradicate this disease from the face of Pakistan.”
Pakistan reported a total of 73 polio cases in 2024. Of these, 27 were from Balochistan, 22 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 22 from Sindh, and one each from Punjab and Islamabad. The country reported its first case of 2025 in Dera Ismail Khan on Jan. 22.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the last two countries in the world where polio remains an endemic.
Immunization campaigns have succeeded in most countries and have come close in Pakistan, but persistent problems remain. In the early 1990s, Pakistan reported around 20,000 cases annually but in 2018 the number dropped to eight cases. Six cases were reported in 2023 and only one in 2021.
Pakistan’s polio program began in 1994 but efforts to eradicate the virus have since been undermined by vaccine misinformation and opposition from some religious hard-liners who say immunization is a foreign ploy to sterilize Muslim children or a cover for Western spies. Militant groups also frequently attack and kill members of polio vaccine teams.