Peshawar: Unidentified armed men shot dead a police constable in northwestern Pakistan on Monday, a police official said as the South Asian country kicked off its first anti-polio nationwide drive of 2025 to vaccinate over 45 million children.
Militant groups in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province have frequently attacked and killed members of polio vaccine teams, and police officials who guard them.
Pakistan’s efforts to eliminate polio have been undermined by vaccine misinformation and opposition from religious hard-liners who say immunization is a foreign ploy to sterilize Muslim children or a cover for Western spies.
“As the slain police officer Abdul Khaliq left his home for polio duty, unidentified gunmen killed him in Sakhi Pul, an impoverished locality in Khyber tribal district today morning,” Naheed Khan, a senior police official, told Arab News.
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 are essential to provide children high immunity against the disease.
Pakistan and Afghanistan remain the only two countries where the disease is endemic. 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.
The Pakistan polio program conducts multiple mass vaccination drives in a year, and this year’s first anti-polio vaccination campaign is expected to continue till Feb. 9.
Pakistan has assembled teams of around 400,000 polio workers to go door-to-door countrywide to vaccinate children below five years of age, Coordinator for Health Dr. Mukhtar Bharath said in a statement.
Dr. Bharath called on parents to support polio vaccinators and ensure their children received the vaccines.
“It is the national and moral responsibility of parents to vaccinate all children under the age of five,” he said.
Pakistan has reported only one polio case this year. However, last year it reported 73 cases with Balochistan province reporting 27, the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh reporting 22 cases each, and Pakistan’s capital city and eastern Punjab province each reporting one case of the disease.
