Malawi finds Africa’s first wild polio case in five years
bbc.com
bbc.com
And second, as a result of anti-vaccine disinformation, largely spread from the US, Europe, and Russia, that has been reaching increasingly internet-connected African communities via Facebook, WhatsApp, and other social media.
https://www.africanews.com/2021/11/23/vaccine-skepticism-hit...
https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/foreign-anti-va...
It's probably going to get worse.
Another factor is just that eradicating polio with the current vaccines is hard. The oral vaccine mutates in around one in a million cases to become effectively wild polio (some years this accounts for most of the polio cases). The fully inactivated injected version is non-sterilizing: it prevents poliomyelitis but still allows for gut infection: eradicating the disease but not the virus.
So, I agree that this is obviously a heinous thing to do because of the unintended consequences that we are now going to be dealing with forever, but I understand the motivation.
With that said, Out of all the evil shit that has come out of CIA why did knowledge of this one become public and why did it become public so soon?
We wouldnt be facing these issues if someone had just kept their damn mouth shut.
Because it wasn't a "fake" vaccination clinic. They legitimately vaccinated people. And the shared it because they didn't see much wrong with it "look at the good we were doing while trying to find Bin-Laden" or something like that.
Basically the people who decided whether to make that stuff public deal in so much heinous stuff they didn't see how the public might not like their vaccine shenanigans.
Anti-polio-vaccination has been endemic in the region for so many decades. Long before the US proxy war in Afghanistan against the USSR.
We're very close to eliminating polio globally (~150 cases a year), and that is a tremendously good thing.
I don't see a COVID angle here.
If you want to blame something, you might look at the CIA's fake vaccination program they used to try and find Bin Laden, and the resulting lack of trust in the legitimate programs in Pakistan and Afghanistan. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7552970/
>The sudden onset of COVID-19 adversely impacted GPEI programme implementation across the globe.
Now, imagine the CIA hadn't massively fed into a significant anti-vaccination conspiracy theory prevalent in the area nearly a decade earlier?
(That rise, incidentally, probably can't be blamed on COVID.)
I don't doubt that COVID impacted programs, but Pakistan could've been done if we hadn't shaken trust in the vaccines.
There are massive assumptions built into your thesis including, the reported cases reflecting the actual outstanding cases, and the primacy of international politics driving vaccination decisions.
Covid has obviously dramatically affected global vaccination priorities.
That might not have mattered in polio’s case if we wiped out polio before 2020.
Which was feasible. Making folks think vaccine campaigns are a CIA plot has obvious impact on reaching that goal.
The CIA is forbidden from impersonating American journalists because of the potential harm. They should be forbidden from doing fake healthcare campaigns for similar reasons.