ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s state media recently announced that over 45 million children were vaccinated against polio in the first countrywide national immunization campaign of the year conducted from Feb. 3-9, as Islamabad attempts to put a stop to rising cases of the infection.
Polio is a paralyzing disease with no cure and to ensure immunity, health experts say it is crucial that all children under five complete the oral polio vaccine series. The South Asian country last year reported 74 polio cases in 2024, a sharp increase from just six cases in 2023.
The Pakistan polio program runs several mass vaccination drives annually. This year’s first anti-polio drive was conducted from Feb. 3 to 9. On Jan. 22, the country reported its first case of the disease in 2025 in the Dera Ismail Khan district of northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
“The Ministry of Health said more than 45 million children have been vaccinated during the National Polio Immunization Campaign,” the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) said.
“During this polio campaign, more than 400,000 trained polio workers visited door to door to perform their services.”
Dr. Mukhtar Bharath, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s Coordinator for Health, said it is a “national and moral” responsibility of parents to get their children under the age of five vaccinated against polio.
He said the complete eradication of polio was the government’s top priority, highlighting that the “war against polio” was being fought with “full force and consistency.”
Bharath said measures were being strengthened to improve polio immunization campaigns across the country.
Of the 73 cases recorded last year, 27 were from southwestern Balochistan, 22 from northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), 22 from southern Sindh, and one each from Punjab and Islamabad.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the last two countries where polio remains endemic. In the early 1990s, Pakistan reported around 20,000 cases annually but in 2018 the number dropped to eight cases.
Pakistan’s polio program began in 1994, but efforts to eradicate the virus have been hampered by vaccine misinformation, opposition from some religious hard-liners who view immunization as a foreign plot, and frequent attacks on polio vaccination teams by militant groups.
